A rise in interest in osteopathic medicine has led to confusion about who is trained to practice this type of medicine. Physician leaders and MSPs must play a part in protecting patients from practitioners who falsify their credentials.
By 2025, it is predicted that there will be a shortage of between 124,000 and 160,000 full-time physicians, according to data presented at the National Cancer Policy Forum. Given the inevitable shortage, we are now seeing an increase in the number of allied health professionals (AHP) as the need...
Congratulations! You have been appointed to a medical staff leadership position at your organization. You have had contact with the medical staff services department (MSSD) over the years, but on some level, you realize that you are not quite sure how the whole thing works. It is imperative that...
The Joint Commission is the latest healthcare heavy-hitter to call for better protection of healthcare workers, recently announcing the creation of Sentinel Event Alert 59, which addresses violence—physical and verbal—against healthcare workers. About 75% of workplace assaults occur in the...
When people think about sexual harassment in medical settings, what often comes to mind is the stereotype of a male supervisor being inappropriate with a female staff member. One might also think of a male attending physician convincing a female resident to exchange sex for career advancement,...
Largely thanks to smartphones and applications, social media sites are available from any location at any time, seemingly with no restrictions. But “no restrictions” doesn’t mean “anything goes,” especially not for healthcare workers. Just this past June, Georgia dermatologist...
In 2014, the national government mandated the use of electronic health records (EHR) for all physicians and hospitals receiving Medicare reimbursement, and since then, physicians across the country have been struggling to adapt. Initially, the transition to EHRs...
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires healthcare employees to use or share only the “minimum necessary” information they “need to know” to do their jobs. For example, a coder needs to look at the entire record of a patient’s hospital stay to apply all the...
Every ED deals with difficult cases. Regardless of the ED’s capacity to deal with an emergent medical condition or with a noncompliant patient, it’s important to be able to show how staff dealt with each patient on a case-by-case basis.
