What is important to understand about Stark is that it does not eliminate opportunities for appropriate physician-hospital collaboration, it simply requires that such collaboration be accomplished through carefully structured and documented arrangements that are "arms length," transparent, and...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 32
The Stark Amendments were created to prevent physicians from referring federally funded patients to a laboratory (Stark I) or more generally to a designated health service (Stark II) in which physicians or their immediate families have a financial interest. These amendments, in conjunction with...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 31
With the evolving roles of many of the allied health disciplines, more allied health practitioners (AHP) are being licensed as indepedent practitioners by the state. As a licensed independent practitioner (LIP), the AHP generally functions as a primary-care practitioner and by state authority...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 30
Sometimes well-intentioned medical staff leaders limit their effectiveness by confusing disruptive behavior with impairment. If an underlying impairment is the cause of disruptive behavior, our impulse is to heal it by providing a therapeutic intervention. But in many cases, the problematic...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 28
The task of creating physician feedback reports has been a challenge for years. There are no official guidelines on what type of data to include or how organizations should collect and calculate those data. And although some medical societies publish benchmarking data for certain procedures,...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 27
A physician peer reviewer with a potential conflict of interest is ethically obligated to disclose it to the rest of the peer review committee. The committee will then determine whether the conflict is susbstantial enough that the peer reviewer in question should not be involved in their...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 26
Flagging individual charts for physician review is just the beginning of the interpretation process; the real interpretation occurs when the physician reviewer looks at the chart. Common concerns are that chart review is subjective and that there is little consistency or inter-rater reliability...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 25
Since there is currently no standard performance feedback report from which to work, many healthcare organizations find themselves wondering exactly what types of information to include. Although each organization must decide for itself what physician data it will continually monitor, all...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 24
A person who believes it is important to consider the interests and concerns of other stakeholders in a situation is said to act ethically. A person who acts only in his or her own interest, even when others are harmed, is said to act unethically. In what they say and do, all leaders consciously...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 21
In your bylaws you should have a section that describes "automatic suspensions." An automatic suspension is an administrative action (time out) that is triggered by a member's failure to abide by previously stated requirements or rules. They require no thought or work by the medical executive...
