A new proposed rule aimed at reducing readmission rates and improving patient care could bring big changes for case management?in some instances requiring hospitals to nearly double the number of full-time case managers they have on staff, say experts.
If you've been working in case management, you already know that your job has gotten a lot more complicated in recent years. The tasks at hand may even be more daunting if you're a department director who is responsible for complying with a host of different mandates that continue to grow by the day.
Compliance with the 2-midnight rule can be tricky for many organizations, which has left many case managers with nagging questions about how to get it right. We got the following questions from our readers and asked two of our experts to weigh in.
CMS finalized its proposals regarding the 2-midnight rule, including moving responsibility for rule enforcement and education from Recovery Auditors to Quality Improvement Organizations (QIO). This latter change occurred October 1, 2015.
The Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which provides oversight of other government entities, released a report in September 2015, OCR Should Strengthen Its Followup of Breaches of Patient Health Information Reported by Covered Entities, that included recommendations on how the entity charged with administering the HIPAA privacy and security rules should improve.
With major security breaches making headlines, HIPAA Phase 2 audits set to begin, and the OIG pressuring OCR to crack down on HIPAA violations, there's never been a better time to get serious about compliance.
