It’s the second year for CMS’s value-based payment modifier (VBM) program, a part of the Affordable Care Act using Medicare reimbursements to encourage high-quality and cost-effective care. However, the number of physician groups rewarded for their scores on the Physician Quality Reporting...
For the last two years, healthcare organizations have been working to comply with the first phase of The Joint Commission's alarm management National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG). As of January 1, 2016, they'll have to contend with the second phase as well.
The average medical practice spends 785 hours a year on quality measure reporting. That’s equivalent to 98 eight-hour days being used to check boxes and fill out text fields. While 81 days of that work is done by other staff, the remaining 17 falls on physicians to complete.
There’s around 1 million American physicians who’re allowed to write opioid prescriptions, or one out of 320 Americans. However, fewer than 32,000 physicians are allowed to prescribe buprenorphine, which is used to treat opioid addiction.
CMS has begun adopting the preventable quality indicators (PQI) rate into its incentive and penalty program as a way to measure the number of preventable hospital admissions. However, PQI rates only agree with physicians' assessments 10% of the time.
On March 1, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged Olympus Corp. with paying millions of dollars in kickbacks to hospitals and doctors to buy its products. The company, which owns 85% of the U.S. endoscope market, has agreed to pay $646 million to resolve the criminal charges and civil charges...
On February 24, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Robert Califf, MD, as the new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner. The Senate vote in Califf’s favor was 89-4, ending a yearlong debate over his suitability.
