The last two and a half years have been anything but business as usual for physician practices and healthcare organizations. From scrambling for PPE in the initial stages of the pandemic, to refitting offices and implementing processes to keep patients and staff safe,...
Healthcare Disruptors
Consolidation in healthcare is causing a lot of disruption and increasing Private Equity investment in the healthcare services space. Industry experts highlighted several disruptors facing the industry and shared insights to the future landscape that are key,...
2021 Reflections
These are recaps of what they report as some of the trends and realities of compliance today
Payer Participation Contracts: Do you know what you are signing?
When it comes to payer contracting, there are some key provisions that you must take seriously. In the past, there were only a few contract elements that were of interest to the provider or practice leadership: fee schedule with carve outs, timely payment of claims,...
Workplace Violence in Healthcare – Tips on handling an Agitated Patient
Workplace violence has been at the forefront of news reports lately and violence against healthcare workers has risen over the past several years. It’s a topic that is sometimes overlooked and can only be eradicated through conversation, education, and solid safety...
Releasing Patient Health Information: Release Management Practices
The exchange or release of health information is essential to the provision of high quality and cost-effective health care. The information released should be within the scope of the request, complete based on the nature of the request and submitted timely. This...
COVID Shines a Light on Employee Safety
Historically, OSHA has been stable in their physician regulations, but the COVID era altered that equation. OSHA had been relatively quiet through the pandemic, letting the CDC do most of the heavy lifting, but since practices opened back up in May 2020 there has been...
Emergency Operations Plans – Your Best Defense
An emergency operations plan (EOP) is your best defense against a disaster, lawsuit, and repetitional damage. In 2017, CMS outlined to17 healthcare entities that to participate in CMS, they must have a plan. Though physician practices are not part of the 17, it is...
First Proposed HIPAA Privacy Rules Changes in 8 Years
In a response to the healthcare community’s desire to lessen the administrative burden on HIPAA covered entities, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued a request of information (RFI) in December of 2018. Two years later, after this RFI comment period closed, the OCR...
Welcome to HCN ELEMENTS, our publication of information and insights on the everchanging regulatory compliance landscape.
ELEMENTS may seem like an unusual name for a newsletter but for us, the word is pretty much of a North Star. We use the “7 Elements of Compliance “to guide everything we do. A little history by way of explanation. In the mid 1990’s the CDC, OSHA and other government...