Telemedicine, Follow-Up Care and State Licensure: The Problem Illustrated As the delivery of healthcare services adapts to the digital age, providers, payers and patients are gradually exploring telemedicine’s possibilities. Evidence that delivering certain routine services via telemedicine may increase patient access to care and decrease cost without sacrificing quality has only served to accelerate this … Continue Reading
Board members for organizations of all sizes need to be familiar with the OIG’s recent publication of Practical Guidance for Health Care Governing Boards on Compliance Oversight. This informative guide is intended to assist the Board member of any health care organization fulfil compliance obligations with the myriad of health care laws and regulations. Although … Continue Reading
On Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) issued a second round of long-awaited red tape reduction initiatives aimed at ameliorating overly burdensome provider regulations. The changes, memorialized within a Final Rule scheduled for publication on May 12, 2014 (available for review here: http://federalregister.gov/a/2014-10687) (“Unpublished Final Rule”) include significant easing of Conditions of … Continue Reading
In the December 2013 edition of AHLA Connections, Tom Zeno and Emily Root analyzed the application of the attorney-client privilege to in house counsel and provided five practice tips to maximize the protection of the privilege for in house counsel. In the article, Emily and Tom explore often overlooked principles of the privilege and illustrate … Continue Reading
Capping a case that has drawn the attention of healthcare lawyers and hospital executives nationwide, the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina has ordered Tuomey Healthcare System, Inc. (“Tuomey”) to pay over $237* million for violations of the Stark Law and False Claims Act arising from certain employment agreements between Tuomey and … Continue Reading
The Affordable Care Act requires the assignment of Medicare beneficiaries based on which physician provides a beneficiary’s primary care services, and delegates the task of prescribing the assignment methodology to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. After considering a majority rule and a plurality rule, CMS believes that the latter should be the governing … Continue Reading
For many of us still digesting last week’s ACO manifesto, the first question we must answer is what kind of organization should seek to qualify as an ACO? “In order to implement the statutory requirements that ACOs have a shared governance mechanism and a formal legal structure for receiving and distributing shared payments, we (CMS) … Continue Reading
The proposed CMS rules for accountable care organizations have only been out a few hours and even the speediest readers are still plowing through them, but a few initial observations are in order: CMS is admitting it needs more than the usual amount of public comment to craft final rules. Perhaps this was intentional but … Continue Reading
