During any screening test, there is a chance of so-called overdiagnosis—finding something that looks like cancer but isn’t, or a cancer that’s so small and slow-growing it would never cause a problem. In those cases, patients may get unnecessary biopsies, surgeries, radiation, or drugs that...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 14, Issue 41
Take a close look at how medical care is being delivered, and it’s clear that physicians and hospitals are being asked to work more closely together to maintain quality even as payments start to shrink. If that’s the case, would it help if more hospital administrators were also clinicians (i.e...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 1, Issue 39
New York State’s new laws requiring healthcare facilities to report the number of personnel who have been vaccinated and to supervise unvaccinated staff to ensure the appropriate use of masks is “absolutely consistent with sound and ethical public policy,” according to a Viewpoint posted Monday...
Communication is the glue that holds an organization together. According to Peter Drucker, a leading expert in organizational leadership, during times of change, leaders' efforts at communication should triple. And we are definitely living through a period of unprecedented change in healthcare.
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 14, Issue 37
Although there is little empirical evidence that eliminating the three-day stay rule will improve patient care without increasing Medicare costs, there is also concern that this rule contributes to suboptimal care and increases costs attributable to avoidable hospitalizations. “There is a...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 14, Issue 32
Researchers at Kaiser Permanente have shown it's possible to automate collection of data from an electronic health record for public quality reporting. They've also proved that this automation saves money, compared to manual data abstraction. However, their paper in the Journal of the...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 1, Issue 11
It is possible that a practitioner simply has not completed enough of a certain procedure in the past two years to be eligible for continued privileges. To avoid denying a practitioner privileges (which must be reported to certain national agencies and will go into a practitioner’s permanent...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 5, Issue 2
CMS has awarded more than $307 million in performance bonuses to 23 states for improving access to children’s health coverage and successfully enrolling eligible children in Medicaid, CMS announced earlier this week. The bonuses were authorized under the Children’s Health Insurance Program...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 2, Issue 14
Hospitals are likely losing money and incurring ill will from patients when they assign them to observation status under Medicare rules, especially if the patient has a general medicine diagnosis, and is female, according to an 18-month study of the practice at a Wisconsin academic medical...
