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.
In recent years, the demand for locum tenens physicians has risen dramatically across the country, largely as the result of increased patient volume. Contributing to this increase is the aging baby boomer population and a drop in uninsured under the Affordable Care Act.
Last month, we explored the “germinating seed” in some medical staff leaders of the recognition that there might be more to healthcare than just the physician-patient interaction that is the cornerstone of our medical training and experience. If this happens, medical staff leaders are encouraged...
