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Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Mark McClellan said the federal government will not process incoming non-HIPAA-compliant Medicare claims submitted for payment on and after Oct. 1, 2005. That decision ended a portion of CMS' HIPAA contingency plan that was in effect since October 2003, under which Medicare continued accepting noncompliant claims after the deadline.
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The Department of Health and Human Services published in the Sept. 23 Federal Register a proposal for adoption of standards for certain attachments to electronic health care claims under HIPAA. The proposed standard would require doctors, hospitals, and other covered entities to use certain transactions, messaging standards, and a new code set when they electronically request the additional information and provide the information in response to the request related to health plans processing claims.
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Increased salary levels may indicate that risk managers finally are being paid more after years of taking on additional duties, according to the results of this year's Healthcare Risk Management Salary Survey.
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The exclusive 2005 Healthcare Risk Management Salary Survey was sent to 1,173 readers in the July 2005 issue. A total of 161 were returned, for a response rate of 14%. The results were tabulated and analyzed by American Health Consultants, publisher of HRM.
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The story hits the news every once in a while, but it always seems like such an extreme case: A hospital staffer confesses to killing multiple patients over time, usually with fatal injections and often under the pretense of a "mercy killing."
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Creating a better defense against health care workers who would harm your patients means working closely with your human resources department, but prepare yourself for a challenge.
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When it comes to the specifics of exactly what to tell the patient, risk mangers and physicians often disagree and -- surprisingly — the physicians are often more in favor of telling the patient the whole story than the risk managers are.
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A survey conducted by Thomas H. Gallagher, MD, included scenarios that presented medical errors to the physician and risk manager respondents and then asked them how they would disclose the error to patients.
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While the severity of malpractice claims continues to rise -- growing at a rate of 7.5% annually -- the frequency of malpractice claims has decreased by 1% over the past year.
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A patient died of natural causes at the defendant hospital. However, when the funeral home came to collect the body, it took the hospital 2 1/2 days to find the corpse.
