With HIPAA Phase 2 audits looming on the horizon, many organizations are gearing up for the audits with internal assessments. We've already talked about how your organization might be unwittingly violating HIPAA, but what penalties are you really facing?
If you find yourself in the midst of a HIPAA breach, your first instinct might be to panic, but you need not. While a security breach of any kind is a high stress event, keeping cool headed and following tried and true breach recovery protocols will help you avoid further trouble down the line.
We’ve known for a while that HIPAA Phase 2 audits are coming, and we know that the randomly selected hospitals to be audited have been chosen. Pending the completion of the online portal for data submission, the audits will begin.
With all this talk about making patient records more accessible to care teams via the magic of the electronic record, HIPAA and HITECH— the two laws that govern patient privacy — might seem like a bit of a downer. They serve a very explicit purpose, however, and ensuring that you are always in compliance will not only save you legal woes, but money in the form of fines and penalties for breaches. There are some obvious breaches of confidentiality that we must strive to avoid: you would never, for instance, post to all your Facebook followers the name, diagnosis and prognosis of a particularly difficult patient that you had today. What you might do instead, though, is go home and tell your spouse all about it. That’s a HIPAA violation.
For quite a while now, news that a wave of HIPAA audits are on the horizon has been circulating in the healthcare scene. But this time, these audits are likely to include financial penalties for violations--new in 2015. So what areas should you be scouring to ensure you're not accidentally committing any violations? In this post, we'll take a look at what HIPAA audits could mean for your organization.
Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) may have an additional three years before penalties would be enforced for poor performance, according to a new proposal by the Federal government. These groups of doctors, hospitals, and providers that care for Medicare patients work jointly as ACOs toward the goal of retaining whatever additional financial resources are left over after completed care. Currently, there are about 330 ACOs in the United States, and together they have saved Medicare more than $700 million in healthcare spending.
The Chief Information Officer in a healthcare system has perhaps one of the most complex and ever-evolving roles in the hospital C-Suite today. Since information technology has now permeated our entire culture - and particularly in medicine - executive level information management is hot field nowadays. Strategic planning within an organization tends to encompass many areas - but for the Chief Information Officer, most of their planning requirements fall under the category of information management. For most modern hospitals, information management is largely to do with electronic health records and the business transactions that surround them. While CIOs are not down in the trenches laying the groundwork for databases or troubleshooting minor issues, they are overseeing the purchasing, implementation and staffing needs to make the whole operation run smoothly.
Lately there have been a number of changes in the healthcare industry that are targeted to provide quality healthcare to patients. Adapting to these changes is critical to the viability and profitability of your medical practice. 1. Implement Electronic Health Record (EHR) system If you haven’t adopted the electronic health record system, then now is the final call to do it. The government has announced July 1, 2014 deadline for physicians to implement EHR system or they will penalized beginning in 2015. Through implementation of electronic health records, physicians will be able to have complete access to comprehensive and accurate information, which will enable them to provide improved and quality medical care to patients. According to government statistics, providers using the EHR system have reported: •94% physicians said with EHR patient records are available every time •88% report EHR benefits clinical procedures of practice •75% providers reported improved patient care
With so many ACA delays thus far, is the ACA really what we bargained for? Should the President have the authority to delay ACA provisions at his discretion or is it his duty to uphold the law as written? The Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010 with provisions becoming effective over several years, many of which have been delayed. Why the ACA delays? •Limited resources for implementing the law •The need to prioritize limited resources •Technological limitations, such as the “glitches” in the computer systems as they related to the healthcare exchanges •Complaints from various quite vocal groups, both political and non •Undue hardships placed on employers and / or employees •Additional time and / or funding required to comply •Tax and reporting requirements •Political reasons
Are you one of many hospitals being dinged with CMS penalties? Are you ready to be dinged for Hospital Acquired Conditions, in addition to readmissions and value-based purchasing? How can a hospital remain profitable? In terms of hockey, the penalty box is where players are sent when they have committed an act which is against the regulations of the game. The player is forced to sit in the penalty box for a period of time, causing the team to play with less players, until the penalty time has lapsed.