Practice Management
Whether your location is fixed in a resort town or a couple of blocks off the interstate, it’s likely people from other areas will be passing through or spending some time nearby this summer. Some of them are going to catch a fish hook to the finger, eat tainted seafood, or be struck with the same URIs they’d be prone to back home. (In fact, insurance industry estimates hold that 20% of people will become …
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Protecting patients against the suspect billing practices—especially “surprise billing”—of freestanding emergency rooms seems to be a high priority in the Texas legislature. Most recently, a bill that offers patients more ways to contest bills was signed into law; Senate Bill 507 expands the use of mediation to contest surprise medical bills. This problem is perceived as especially great in Texas, which is home to more than half of the freestanding ERs in the country. Further, …
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Wellmont Health System is taking a hard look at how it can integrate services among its urgent care centers and hospital facilities. The company has announced a goal of having an urgent care center within 30 minutes of every patient in its region. It’s noteworthy that Wellmont views distance between the urgent care center and the patient (and not the nearest hospital) to be of key importance. Given the trend toward viewing urgent care centers …
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Pharmaceutical giant Merck and Heritage Valley Health System are the latest healthcare organizations to be struck with a ransomware attack. The same event created havoc across Europe, as well. Electronic security experts point to a version of the Petya virus as the likely “pathogen.” While Merck was largely mum on how it fared, Heritage Valley said its network had “protections” put in place by its antivirus software vendor to ensure patient care was not disrupted. …
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) may have doled out more than $729 million in incentive payments for use of electronic health record systems that didn’t actually comply with federal standards, according to the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at Health and Human Services. The OIG has already uncovered instances where providers who received payments could not document that they were using electronic health records in “meaningful” ways—a key requirement to reap …
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Add adolescent concussion to the growing list of conditions for which telemedicine can be useful, in terms of effectiveness, cost, and satisfaction scores, according to data presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Researchers employed a nurse practitioner-led, remote assessment of young athletes (13–18 years of age) with concussions, in conjunction with in-person athletic trainers. The most common positive feedback involved the accessibility of the program from any location, notably …
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The U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission tells us we can expect a spike in emergency room visits on or around the Independence Day holiday next week. If you’ve done a good job of alerting your community to the fact that many ED-bound patients could be treated just as well (not to mention faster and less expensively) in your urgent care center, that means you can expect to see more traffic, too. Make sure your holiday …
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Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has broadened the definition of “small providers” as it applies to the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, to the extent that physician practices with less than $90,000 in Medicare revenue or fewer than 200 unique Medicare patients per year would be exempt from having to comply with MACRA. Between this new standard and the one proposed for next year, the move will exclude roughly 834,000 more …
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A contingent from the Urgent Care Association (UCA) descended on Congressional offices to school lawmakers and their staffs on the important role urgent care plays in the healthcare continuum. Coinciding with the UCA Urgent Care Convention & Expo at nearby National Harbor, the visit put 15 UCA representatives face-to-face with 75 congressional staffers, including those who work on committees with jurisdiction over Medicaid and veteran’s healthcare. In addition to giving lawmakers a better idea of …
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The Affordable Care Act—also known as the ACA, or “Obamacare”—famously drove many insurers out of state exchanges due to the difficulty they had in turning a profit through their participation. President Trump says the plan he’d like to see in place would be both superior and less expensive than his predecessor’s. Humana isn’t planning on sticking around to find out, however, and has announced it will not be participating in any individual insurance market after …
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