A sound understanding of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and how to apply its requirements in practical, real-world settings is the foundation of a successful compliance program—one that fulfills an organization’s legal obligations while defending patients, staff, and the organization from cyberattacks and damaging privacy violations.

Hospitals and health systems may be losing billions of dollars due to physician burnout, according to a paper released by the National Taskforce for Humanity in Healthcare (NTH). The NTH estimates that burnout-related turnover may cost health systems up to $1.7 billion annually for hospital-employed physicians and up to $17 billion across all U.S. physician.

There are a variety of viable ways to approach the delineation of medical history and physical exam (H&P) privileges. Attached is a sampling of core privilege statements for various disciplines. Some address H&Ps in explicit terms, and others use alternative language.

Since microhospitals are currently subject to regulations developed decades ago and with larger acute care institutions in mind, they can run into compliance obstacles that their traditional counterparts don’t often encounter or are better equipped to handle. Compared to a tertiary hospital, resources can be tight and clinical expertise narrowly concentrated in a scaled-down facility.

Published 5/2/18

According to the AMA, nearly a quarter of physicians actively practicing in the United States in 2015 were age 65 or older. In a world where longer life spans and delayed retirement have become commonplace, this statistic is not particularly shocking, but it points to a question that hospital medical staffs continually struggle to answer: When physicians reach a certain “advanced age,” should they be required to undergo some sort of regular evaluation to make sure their cognitive and physical skills are still up to par?

Published 4/30/18

CRC members can peruse all the online articles from the April 2018 issues of Credentialing Resource Center Journal and Medical Staff Briefing—as well as full-color PDFs—here:

• CRCJ
• MSB

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

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