This week's note from the instructor reviews a recent CMS report on the Innovation Center's progress in testing new payment and service delivery models.
Q: I have heard that HIPAA says covered entities must keep data backups a minimum of five miles away from the original site where the data was collected. Is this correct? Are there any restrictions or guidance about the location of data backups?
This week's note from the instructor reviews a recent CMS report on the Innovation Center's progress in testing new payment and service delivery models.
CMS may have overpaid hospitals, physicians, and freestanding facilities almost $270 million for polysomnography services that did not meet Medicare requirements over a two-year period, according to an Office of Inspector General report.
This week’s Medicare updates include the extension of a final rule on improvements for acute care and critical access hospitals, an OIG report on potential abuse and neglect at skilled nursing facilities, a revision to the July update of HCPCS codes, and more!
It can be impractical for medical researchers to seek authorization from all the patients whose medical records are sought for a study. That’s why HIPAA allows researchers to use de-identified PHI from records without individual authorization.
Q: Our clinical trial claims often hit edits for missing drugs or devices when those are supplied by the trial sponsor and we can't bill for them. We've been manually reviewing these edits. Is there a recommended method for handling these types of edits that's more efficient?
Q: We have a patient who received a pancreas transplant for the treatment of diabetes. The patient was later admitted to the hospital for treatment of an unrelated kidney stone. Would I still need to assign the ICD-10-CM code for diabetes as a chronic condition based on the patient’s medical history?
Medical Informatics Engineering, Inc., an Indiana-based medical records service has agreed to a $100,000 settlement with OCR and a $900,000 multi-state settlement with 16 state attorney general offices for a HIPAA breach that compromised the protected health information of approximately 3.5 million people.
