The Colorado House of Representatives recently passed a bill requiring Colorado hospitals to submit information regarding uncompensated care and certain expenditures to the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (DHCF). The bill tasks DHCF and the Colorado Healthcare Affordability and Sustainability Board with compiling information from publicly-available resources and the information submitted by hospitals to create an annual hospital expenditure report. The final hospital expenditure report would be presented to the governor and certain general assembly committees and would be posted to a publicly-available website.
If passed, hospitals will be required to submit cost reports, annual audited financial statements, and a report containing data such as total number of available beds, inpatient statistics by major payor group and by setting, outpatient utilization statistics, gross charges, operating expenses, staffing information, names and transaction price of acquired hospitals, physician groups, and physician practices, and a balance sheet. Hospitals would provide information for fiscal years 2011-12 through 2018-19 in the first round of submissions. If passed, the bill would take effect on August 2, 2019, and DHCF would submit its first report to the governor and certain committees by January 15, 2020.
The Colorado House of Representatives is also considering another bill that would create a freestanding emergency department license. Colorado freestanding emergency departments are licensed as community clinics with emergency departments. The new freestanding emergency department license would be issued to hospital-owned or affiliated emergency departments that are more than 250 yards from the hospital’s main campus, as well as to independent emergency departments not attached to a hospital or situated within 250 yards of a hospital.
If passed, any facility that would like to operate as a freestanding emergency department would have to submit an annual application for licensure starting on December 1, 2021. Licensed community clinics or community clinics serving an underserved population would be able to request a waiver from the Department of Public Health. The State Board of Health would set the licensure requirements, fees, and safety standards.
