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Operation Access, a nonprofit organization, brings together 110 physicians, 155 nurses and techs, and 16 hospitals that volunteer their OR time, fees, pharmaceuticals, and other supplies. In 2003, the organization performed 260 cases.
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Keep in mind that for public relations (PR) purposes, and in some cases for legal purposes, a collections firm is an extension of your program, says Scott Becker, CPA, JD, co-chair of the Health Care Department at the Chicago-based law firm McGuireWoods.
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Outpatient surgery managers are taking notice of 31 lawsuits that have been filed against nearly 300 nonprofit hospitals and the Chicago-based American Hospital Association (AHA) in federal court since June. The lawsuits claim some tax-exempt hospitals charged uninsured patients more than insured ones or that they use aggressive collection practices against low-income patients.
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End-stage renal disease is a devastating condition that, according to the United States Renal Data System, plagued approximately 406,000 individuals in the United States in 2001 and is projected to increase to a prevalence of approximately 725,000 by 2010. Furthermore, it is a major public health issue, given the overall poor outcomes and high costs for this chronic condition.
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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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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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Even though less than a year remains before the HIPAA security rule takes effect April 21, 2005, many health care organizations are a long way from compliance, according to an assessment by Washington, DC-based URAC, the only organization offering a security accreditation program based directly on the HIPAA security rule.
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As of April 2004, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) had received more than 5,000 complaints from individuals about alleged HIPAA privacy violations.
