Bryant’s XBRL Conference tackles health exchanges

SMITHFIELD – Bryant University brings the newly opened health insurance exchanges into the conversation at its annual XBRL and Healthcare Standardization Conference this week, exploring ways that financial reporting standardization concepts can be applied to the health care industry.

This Thursday and Friday, business professionals from around the country will gather to examine communication in the healthcare industry can be improved through the accessibility of standardized data about health care costs.

Saeed Roohani, professor of accounting at Bryant and organizer of the conference, explained that in the same strategies used to standardize business reporting language to make data analysis easier could improve communication in the health care industry.

Just as extensive business reporting language (XBRL) standardized business terminology so that businesses were no longer using “income statement,” “statement of earnings” and “statement of profit and loss” to mean the same thing, a system to standardize costs for patients, providers, and health insurance carriers could be developed, Roohani said.

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Currently, the data on health care costs is poor, Roohani said. The same procedure might cost different amounts depending on the hospital or health insurance carrier. But consumers don’t know what those costs are.

That’s supposed to change with the new health insurance exchanges, Roohani said. While now it’s primarily a place where people are going to purchase insurance, the idea is for the exchange to be a “true marketplace” where consumers will actually be able to compare pricing for certain procedures, he said.

But in order to get to that point, reporting of revenues and costs in the health care industry needs to improve, he said, and business data standardization strategies can help.

Presenters will discuss this topic, cyberhacking and safeguarding information networks, and business and health care data analytics.

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