It’s happening in South Carolina and across the nation—hospitals are acquiring more physician practices as they prepare to move away from a fee-for-service reimbursement system that pays for services and treatments to one that focuses more on quality outcomes and containing costs. South...
In an effort to increase the shelf life of medical guidelines and recommendations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has created the CDC Stacks, a free digital library comprised of peer-reviewed articles and other public health documents. More than 16,500 entries can be...
Wahiawa (Hawaii) General Hospital has agreed to pay about $450,000 to settle lawsuits alleging improper billing, the Associated Press (AP) reported last week. An investigation began after a physician alleged the hospital submitted bills for services provided by resident physicians without the...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 14, Issue 35
Female physicians in the U.S. continue to earn less than their male counterparts, with the pay gap widening during the past two decades to more than $50,000 annually in 2010, according to a report published in JAMA Internal Medicine last week.
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 14, Issue 35
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia currently allow nurse practitioners (NP) to work autonomously, but a bill to add California to the list has failed in the Legislature amid intense lobbying against it by the California Medical Association (CMA) and other powerful physician groups,...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 14, Issue 35
Only 245 cases of patient harm in surgeries using the Da Vinci robot system have been reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 2000. The figure seems “very, very low” to Johns Hopkins University researchers, who have identified eight cases of patient harm or death that were...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 14, Issue 35
Wahiawa General Hospital, of Wahiawa, Hawaii, has agreed to pay about $450,000 to settle lawsuits alleging improper billing, the Associated Press (AP) reported last week. An investigation began after a physician alleged the hospital submitted bills for services provided by resident physicians...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 14, Issue 35
Former Medicare chief Donald Berwick, MD, said Obama administration officials should abandon a rule that leaves many older Americans without coverage for expensive rehabilitation care after they leave the hospital. The Medicare rule requires recipients to be admitted as a hospital inpatient for...
The Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) National Practitioner Data Bank will replace the Interface Control Document Transfer Program (ITP) with the Querying and Reporting XML Service (QRXS) on July 31, 2014. Users who currently query or report through the Data Bank website or...
Physicians often depend on continuing medical education (CME) to learn about new tests and therapies, and CME is required for physician relicensing, recredentialing, and recertification. However, 75% of CME providers received support from commercial entities in 2011, which raises concerns about...
