The Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986 (HCQIA) was created to provide immunity from monetary damages to hospitals and individual practitioners participating on medical peer review committees. HCQIA also created the National Practitioner Data Bank.
Many clients have asked me about appropriate privileging for telemedicine providers. This is a regulatory issue, and the most common regulatory agencies, The Joint Commission and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), have not been in sync with their requirements....
The Joint Commission released a new FAQ on medical staff standard MS.01.01.01 on March 10, 2011. The FAQ clarified that the medical staff is not required to hold general medical staff meetings, even though meetings were required up until 2004. In that same 2004 revision, The Joint Commission...
Orienting hospitalists involves more than just providing new hires with a badge, showing them where the ED is, and sending them on their merry way. As employees of the hospital,...
Although hospitalists are well aware of their programs’ resource utilization and case management goals, they may lose sight of those goals during the course of their busy days. They may feel like they need an extra set of arms and legs and a...
Hospitalists have long been touted as the drivers of quality improvement initiatives, and one of their key tools for tracking the effectiveness of their initiatives is a dashboard. Dashboards are short reports containing data, often depicted in graphs, charts, and tables, that summarize the...
Credentialing Resource Center Journal - Volume 19, Issue 5
I’m sitting in my office, head in one hand, mocha in the other, trying to fulfill the request for privileging criteria, P&P, and an introduction letter to our medical staff for a procedure that is new to our facility and quite the stranger to me. The feeling of being stranded on a remote...
As the number of intensivists dwindles and demand for their services rises, hospitalists are stepping in to care for critical patients.
"We are way beyond the discussion of whether hospitalists should be in the ICU-they are already there. In many cases, they are managing the patients as...
Many hospitalist programs managers—if they haven't already—will see an increase in patients' need for palliative care. According to Jean Kutner, MD, MSPH, professor of medicine and division head of general internal medicine at the University of Colorado Denver, the...