From state to state, the effectiveness of protecting credentials documents from legal discovery varies widely. Most states have fairly strong protections, but a handful of states are exceptions to this rule. In most jurisdictions, credentialing forms, such as the following, are discoverable by...
Whether it is due to a conflict of interest of a lack of staff with the proper expertise, most organizations will eventually need to use external peer review. It is recommended that all organizations have a policy regarding external peer review. Although instances of when to use external peer...
After providing additional training to its surveyors to increase oversight of a hospital’s plan of correction, The Joint Commission (TJC) has been approved by CMS to accredit psychiatric hospitals for participation in Medicare for another six years.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) recently announced proposed permanent rules that are aimed at preventing online overprescribing of controlled substances by requiring in-person visits with physicians for some medications.
The medical executive committee (MEC) interacts with many individuals and groups in the hospital. One of the most important relationships in terms of patient care is between the MEC and the general medical staff. The MEC ensures that the medical staff has good physicians through credentialing...
A woman was able to practice as a psychiatrist in the United Kingdom for over 20 years despite not having a medical degree. Zholia Alemi claimed she had a medical degree from The University of Auckland in New Zealand and registered as a physician in the United Kingdom in 1995. In truth, Alemi...
In the face of a healthcare provider shortage, Montana lawmakers have introduced a bill to give physician assistants (PA) more independence to practice unsupervised.
The number of privileging disputes occurring in hospitals is growing rapidly. It’s easy to understand this trend if you examine how medicine has evolved. In the “good old days,” physicians of all specialties had a defined area of turf on the playing field and specialties didn’t cross those...
In the first half of 2022, 7.5 million Medicare users accessed telehealth services to receive healthcare. During that same time, there were about 45 million Medicare telehealth-eligible users. This is according to the Medicare Telehealth Trends Report, which looked at telehealth usage by...
Does your medical executive committee suffer through long meetings, unproductive diatribes, filibusters, broken records (i.e., bringing up the same old issues and rehashing them over and over), and complaints from members that the meetings are just too long? If so, you may want to try a few of...
