Law enforcement officials in Texas, Florida, and New York recently announced plea agreements and fines involving the billing of an unapproved prescription drug and Medicare fraud.
One of the major changes to the 2013 CPT Manual is the replacement of the term "physician" with "physician or other qualified healthcare professional" (QHP) in a wide range of codes.
Successful programs to reduce preventable hospital readmissions range from the transitional care model created by Mary Naylor, PhD, FAAN, RN, a nurse researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, to Project RED, created by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Kathleen Heery, MS, RN, CCM, and Cheryl Pacella, DNP(c), HHCNS-BC, CPHQ, the homecare consultant and quality advisor at CAP Consulting, LLC, discussed the secrets to their success during "Reducing Readmissions by Improving Transitions in Care," an HCPro webcast.
The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) wants improved and unified health information governance to standardize EHR use. AHIMA says the move will lead to technology that provides better, more efficient patient care.
It has been quite a year in the privacy world, hasn't it? The OCR website has reported 500 breaches of unsecured PHI affecting 500 or more individuals, totaling more than 12 million patients. There has been an increase in HIPAA-related criminal sentences involving jail time. And private lives are no longer private.
