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Illinois hospitals are in the process of developing procedures for fielding questions about the Hospital Report Card Act, an Illinois law that became effective in January.
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A HIPAA-related criminal conviction has drawn attention to the seriousness of violations regarding protected health information and should be used as an object lesson in access training initiatives, suggests Michelle Masucci, JD, counsel in the health services group for the law firm of Nixon Peabody, LLC, in Garden City, NY.
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One-on-one coaching is a new aspect of call center training that is as important as the usual focus on customer service skills and keeping the calls flowing in a timely manner, says Katherine Dean, SPHR, a partner in Banks & Dean, an international professional services firm based in Toronto.
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With reports touting the financial and customer service benefits of call centers, its no wonder that more hospitals often under the aegis of their access departments are looking either to establish a call center or to expand the capabilities of an existing one.
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Legal barriers posed by certain fraud and abuse, antitrust, federal income tax, intellectual property, malpractice, and state licensing laws hinder providers adoption of health information technology, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a recent report.
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A recent posting on the web site medlaw.com warns hospitals to assess their vulnerability to acts of terrorism and suggests some precautionary measures.
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A telecommuting project in the pre-services department at Carolinas HealthCare System in Charlotte, NC, is reducing the amount of work time lost to bad weather and delighting employees who find themselves well suited to working at home.
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Hospitals will not be required to report a patients immigration status to receive funding for uncompensated emergency care provided to undocumented immigrants, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has said in a letter to the American Hospital Association.
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An Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) requirement regarding the responsibilities of hospitals when a patient is transferred to another facility was clarified recently by Stephen Frew, JD, a risk management consultant and EMTALA expert.
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Providers and health plan representatives say two provisions of the HIPAA privacy rule the requirement to account for certain information disclosures and the requirement to develop agreements with business associates that extend privacy protections downstream are unnecessarily burdensome, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office.
