Company: UHS
Filing Date: 2025-02-26
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-027785
Chunk: 59

Company: UNIVERSAL HEALTH SERVICES INC
Filing Date: 2025-02-26
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 59
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 party may opt for a binding independent dispute resolution (“IDR”) process. CMS regulations and guidance implementing the IDR process has been subject to a significant amount of provider-initiated litigation. As a result, portions of those regulations and guidance materials have been vacated by a federal district court, causing CMS to, on several occasions, pause and resume IDR process operations, causing significant delay in the processing of claims. Additionally, arguments made by the plaintiffs in such litigation have included allegations that CMS’s regulations and guidance materials are favorable to payers. For these reasons, there can be no assurances that we will receive timely payments in connection with this process. 

We are required to treat patients with emergency medical conditions regardless of ability to pay.

In accordance with our internal policies and procedures, as well as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA, we provide a medical screening examination to any individual who comes to one of our hospitals while in active labor and/or seeking medical treatment (whether or not such individual is eligible for insurance benefits and regardless of ability to pay) to determine if such individual has an emergency medical condition. If it is determined that such person has an emergency medical condition, we provide such further medical examination and treatment as is required to stabilize the patient’s medical condition, within the facility’s capability, or arrange for transfer of such individual to another medical facility in accordance with applicable law and the treating hospital’s written procedures. Our obligations under EMTALA may increase substantially going forward. If the number of indigent and charity care patients with emergency medical conditions we treat increases significantly, or if regulations expanding our obligations to inpatients under EMTALA is proposed and adopted, our results of operations will be harmed.

If we fail to continue to meet the promoting interoperability criteria related to electronic health record systems (“EHR”), our operations could be harmed.

Pursuant to Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (“HITECH”) regulations, hospitals that did not qualify as a meaningful user of EHR by 2015 were subject to a reduced market basket update to the inpatient prospective payment system (“IPPS”) standardized amount in 2015 and each subsequent fiscal year. In the 2019 IPPS final rule, CMS re-named the meaningful use program to “promoting interoperability”.  We believe that all of our acute care hospitals have met the applicable promoting interoperability criteria and therefore are not subject to a reduced market basked update to the IPPS standardized amount. However, under the HITECH Act, hospitals must