Over the past five years, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has been more aggressive about identifying organizations that fail to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and its impending regulations. Historically, OCR has taken a reactive approach to noncompliance t...
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SUMMARY That a new administration will take steps in 2017 to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is fairly certain, but eligible anesthesia providers should forge ahead with their plans to report under the Quality Payment Program mandated by the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA). Regardless of what happens to the ACA, MACRA and ...
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Rick Bushnell, MD, MBADirector, Department of Anesthesia, Shriners Hospital for Children, Los Angeles, CAand Huntington Memorial Hospital, Pasadena, CA You trade on it every day. It may be your anesthesia group's most important asset. It's difficult to quantify, but in the accounting sense, "good will" is the value of your anesthesia group's assets...
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On October 1, 2015, a major change to diagnosis coding was rolled out with the International Classification of Diseases and Health Related Problems 10th revision (ICD-10), and virtually all payers (except workers compensation and auto carriers) have agreed to implement the new codes. There was serious concern that the complexity of the new code seq...
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SUMMARY The rigorous process improvement methodologies known as Lean and Six Sigma have countless applications in healthcare and have been used to improve many aspects of anesthesia care. Anesthesia providers might want to consider employing these approaches in their quality improvement efforts. Hospitals and healthcare practices have used the Lean...
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