Q: As part of the audit controls policy at my organization, we hired an external security vendor to collect and review logs from several critical servers. The vendor creates tickets for our IT staff when a potential incident is discovered during the daily log review. This supplements our own activity reviews of internally generated reports, and the vendor then uses them for its own review. Our internal staff never sees the reports the vendor uses for its review. Do the reports the vendor uses fall under the HIPAA requirement for retaining logs for six years? Should we compel the vendor to retain these reports?
In a concerted effort to move healthcare payments to a system of "quality over quantity," CMS finalized policies that greatly expanded packaging for outpatient providers in the 2015 OPPS final rule (www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2014-11-10/pdf/2014-26146.pdf). It also introduced complexity adjustments with comprehensive ambulatory payment classifications (C-APCs).
In December 2014, CMS posted a document on its Advisory Panel on Hospital Outpatient Payment (HOP Panel) website outlining the hospital outpatient therapeutic services that were recently evaluated for a change in supervision levels. The three-page document contains a chart that includes the HCPCS code, the level of supervision required for coverage, and the effective dates of the changes for various services.
Since portions of the reproductive system use some of the same structures as the urinary system, including the urethra, codes for conditions involving both male and female reproductive systems appear in Chapter 14 of ICD-10-CM, Diseases of the Genitourinary System.
As new and more effective treatment options are created and evaluated, AMA must update the CPT® Manual to add and revise codes that allow providers to accurately report the work they performed.
The 2015 updates include more than 500 changes, including more than 250 new codes that impact nearly every section. In the 2015 CPT Manual, only the integumentary and respiratory system sections remain unchanged.
