Considering the daily challenges homeless individuals face, their high readmission rate should be unsurprising. Properly managing one's health is difficult for those worried about where they will sleep or find their next meal.
Each year the Office of Inspector General (OIG) outlines its enforcement priorities. Its 2015 Work Plan includes items case managers should have on their radar.
After physicians treat them in the emergency department (ED), millions of patients each year head home to recover, but not all of them do so successfully. Many wind up needing to head right back to the hospital because something goes wrong and the discharge fails. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) recently partnered with the Johns Hopkins University Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality to study this issue.
This week’s updates include solicitation of new safe harbor and special fraud alerts and changes to the Recovery Audit Program. Click the link above to read more about this week’s updates.
Q: I was recently hired for a position at a long-term care facility. Upon getting acclimated, I learned that the facility has completed handwritten logs for every fax that was sent out since 2003. This document is referred to as the HIPAA fax log and contains the date the fax was sent, to whom it was sent, by whom it was sent, the number of pages, and whether a cover sheet with confidentiality statement was included. I would like to do away with this form since fax machines can generate their own logs. However, if this is a necessary process then I would like to follow official guidelines and update the facility's policies and procedures accordingly. Does the HIPAA Privacy or Security Rule require these logs? If so, what information must we include?
