Who can be a credentials committee member? Your organization’s medical staff bylaws and/or credentialing policies and procedures set the actual criteria for credentials committee membership. Although it’s good to enumerate some basic requirements for membership, it’s also worthwhile to note that more effective credentials committee members are often those who exceed the minimum qualifications.

Physician recruiting firm Merritt Hawkins noticed an interesting in 2017: recruitment for specialists increased while recruitment for primary care physicians decreased. According to Merritt Hawkins' 25th Annual Review of Physician and Advanced Practitioner Recruiting Incentives, 74% of recruiting assignments were for medical specialties, up 7% from three years ago. As for primary care, searches for these physicians decreased by 32% percent from three years ago. The report assessed the 3,00 recruiting assignments Merritt Hawkins conducted from April 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018.

Editor's note: Today's Free Resource is a members-only article and form that we are making available to all CRC Daily readers. To make sure you receive all of the forms and articles available on CRC, click here.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires healthcare employees to use or share only the “minimum necessary” information they “need to know” to do their jobs. For example, a coder needs to look at the entire record of a patient’s hospital stay to apply all the correct codes. However, perusing the correspondence section of the record is unnecessary and inappropriate.

The answer is maybe. One possible exception is this three-part consideration: (1) the physician is 100% in an ambulatory setting, (2) the practice site is a hospital/health system corporation with its own unique (non-hospital) CMS billing number, and (3) the physician does not require any hospital-based privileges. Strictly speaking, such a physician does not require either medical staff membership or privileges.

CRC members can peruse all the online articles from the June 2018 issues of CRCJ and MSB—as well as full-color, newly redesigned PDFs—here:

• CRCJ
• MSB

To access the relevant full-issue PDF, select "DOWNLOAD FULL ISSUE" at the top of the page.

Also, 63,000 patients affected by data breach, hospital network hit with class-action lawsuit, and physicians settle kickback allegations

Every ED deals with difficult cases. Regardless of the ED’s capacity to deal with an emergent medical condition or with a noncompliant patient, it’s important to be able to show how staff dealt with each patient on a case-by-case basis.

The Court of Appeals of Ohio in the Sixth Appellate District (the “Court”) reversed a trial court’s judgment ordering a hospital to turn over documents within a physician’s credentialing file as part of a negligent credentialing lawsuit.

With massive data breaches rocking industries and the public, and policymakers scrutinizing how organizations respond, it’s time to dust off policies and ensure organizations have meaningful, compliant reporting and response plans.

The 2019 Credentialing Resource Center Symposium will be held February 26-28 in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand. With so many credentialing, privileging, and medical staff leadership topics to cover, the Symposium has been expanded to 2.5 days and will feature a new provider enrollment track. Stay tuned as we announce our speakers and agenda, but in the meantime, mark your calendars!

Do you think telemedicine services are as effective as in-person services? Answer our latest poll question to let us know. You must be signed in with your free or paid CRC account to participate.

Click here to learn more about telemedicine. Have a different question on your mind? Click here to get the conversation started in the CRC forums.