It's November. It's the time of year when Americans give reasons for being thankful. One of them, of course, is a huge turkey dinner with all the fixings on the fourth Thursday of the month.
This article incorporates activities that an organization can use to improve the policy process and ensure the development and implementation of effective policies. While we may think we have written HIPAA policies, remember that HIPAA is one set of requirements facing all organizations that work with information.
Business continuity is critical when a disaster or other event occurs that disables any organization's ability to continue to provide critical services.
With today's emphasis on population health and better management of patients with multiple chronic conditions, payers and providers are increasingly teaming up to improve care. There's good incentive to do so. Patients with multiple chronic conditions are not only common within the Medicare population, but also use a disproportionate share of Medicare dollars.
Providers know the drill for addressing and operationalizing CMS' annual IPPS and OPPS updates, along with the usual ICD-9-CM and CPT® coding changes. The industry has become used to CMS' timetable for releasing inpatient and outpatient proposed and final rules and knows that it has to be ready to go live with coding, billing, and operational changes October 1 and January 1, respectively.
