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When the patient access department at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center-Presbyterian in Philadelphia has its monthly staff meeting these days, theres an added attraction. After the insurance updates, schedule changes, and other pertinent matters are handled, attendees are asked to participate in an interactive customer service initiative.
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The third stage of an ambitious campaign aimed at streamlining emergency department operations gets under way this month as Baptist Memorial Health Care in Memphis, TN, begins recruiting members for a new ED volunteer corps. Whats unusual about this hospital volunteer initiative is that it is targeted to young people who may be considering jobs in the health care field.
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Nearly 82 million Americans younger than 65 went without health insurance for all or part of 2002 and 2003, according to a report released recently by Families USA.
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The HIPAA Implementation Working Group, a coalition formed to help providers and vendors better understand the process by which the HIPAA electronic standards are developed and modified and to increase provider and vendor representation in that process, has contacted Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Mark McClellan to express concern over a CMS instruction to fiscal intermediaries to reject claims lacking certain data elements not needed by Medicare for claims adjudication.
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The HIPAA Conformance Certification Organization says its Common Compliance Assessment Process determined that, on average, the nations leading HIPAA translation and validation vendors agree in their interpretation of compliance 43% of the time, up from an average of 35% on all transactions in 2003.
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Source: Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, National Immunization Program, Atlanta
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Health care workers need an annual influenza (flu) vaccine to protect themselves and their patients, advise national infection control officials. The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology has added its voice and power to that message.
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The labor and delivery department may be where the risk of infant abductions is greatest, but it is far from the only area of the hospital needing a risk managers attention. Children are often taken from other areas of the hospital that may not receive as much attention.
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All the hospitals where infant abductions have occurred identified unmonitored elevator or stairwell access to the postpartum and nursery areas as a root cause, according to information from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
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A recent incident in which a surgeon allegedly arrived drunk for a procedure illustrates an important lesson about how broadly risk managers should educate staff about the concept of patient safety, says one expert.
