Physicians will be allowed to accept donations of electronic prescribing software, electronic medical records software, and training services from hospitals and health plans under expanded safe harbors to the Anti-Kickback Statute, the Department of Health and Human Services announced August 1...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 30
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) announced in its July 12 issue that authors must disclose all potential conflicts of interest, including specific financial interests and relationships relevant to the subject of the manuscript. Beginning in January 2007, JAMA will require...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 30
Sometimes well-intentioned medical staff leaders limit their effectiveness by confusing disruptive behavior with impairment. If an underlying impairment is the cause of disruptive behavior, our impulse is to heal it by providing a therapeutic intervention. But in many cases, the problematic...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 29
Contrary to popular perception, higher levels of uninsured, low-income, minority, and immigrant populations do not cause higher rates of emergency department (ED) use, according to an analysis of 60 American communities.
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 28
An analysis of physician labor inputs across regions with an academic medical center projects a surplus of nearly 50,000 physicians by the year 2020, based on regions with the lowest number of doctors per capita. The lead author of the study argues that adding more physicians to the workforce is...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 28
Fifty percent of healthcare providers in rural Colorado and Kansas believe that palliative care at the end of life could be improved at their facility, according to the results of a survey published in the Journal of Rural Health. Differences in perceptions of palliative care among clinicians,...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 28
The task of creating physician feedback reports has been a challenge for years. There are no official guidelines on what type of data to include or how organizations should collect and calculate those data. And although some medical societies publish benchmarking data for certain procedures,...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 27
A study of quality process measures for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) found that their application accounted for only 6% of hospital-level variation in risk-standardized, 30-day mortality rates for patients with AMI. The study, published in the July 5 issue of the Journal of the American...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 27
A physician peer reviewer with a potential conflict of interest is ethically obligated to disclose it to the rest of the peer review committee. The committee will then determine whether the conflict is susbstantial enough that the peer reviewer in question should not be involved in their...
Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 7, Issue 26
Americans made more than 1.1 billion visits annually to physician offices and hospital emergency and outpatient departments in 2004, up by 31% since 1994, according to the latest data released by The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on June 23, in its annual national hospital ambulatory medical...