CBISA Online™ and IRS 990 Schedule H

The IRS is imposing new reporting requirements for hospitals in their annual Form 990 tax return filing starting in tax year 2009. The new information concerns the nature and scope of a hospital's community benefit efforts. All of this information will be reported in the new Schedule H "Hospitals". Lyon Software has been following the IRS draft issues of the new Schedule H, and we have been changing CBISA Online™ to accommodate these new 990H requirements.

Historically, most hospitals have reported community benefit using the CHA/VHA framework as a guideline. The IRS has relied heavily on the CHA/VHA guidelines in defining what information will need to be reported on Schedule H. Over 1,100 hospitals have been tracking and reporting their community benefit using Lyon Software's CBISA™ software, a program recommended by CHA/VHA. This software has been evolving, in a strategic partnership with these two organizations, over 18 years. As CBISA™ is incorporating all of the requirements of the IRS Schedule H, it is carefully retaining the requirements of the CHA/VHA framework. In the future, hospitals using CBISA™ will be able to continue to report community benefit as they have, and they will also be able to generate all of the specific information needed by the Form 990 Schedule H. For our 1,100 CBISA™ hospital and health system clients, CBISA™ is "still the one" for community benefit, and it is "now the one" for the 990H as well. For non-clients, consider implementing CBISA™, sooner rather than later, to ensure that a systematic methodology is in place to handle your upcoming 990H filing for Tax Year 2009.

Community benefit coordinators will need to work even more closely with their finance departments to facilitate complete and accurate reporting in their Form 990 Schedule H. To reinforce your knowledge about the new IRS 990H requirements, and to demonstrate how CBISA™ has changed to incorporate these requirements, we recommend our upcoming half-day education workshop. Plan to attend in a city near you, and plan to attend as a collaborative team, containing at least one person from finance and one from community benefit. The workshop is designed to identify areas of collaboration between finance and community benefit staff members, and will cover topics which will enable you to have a better understanding of the new IRS requirements.

For more information regarding the education workshop, click here.