Matching the clinical privileges a practitioner requests to his or her demonstrated current competence is critical. To accomplish this goal, hospitals must develop and maintain a criteria-based privileging system that accurately defines the services currently offered by the facility and appropriately reflects the scope of services provided by each practitioner.

According to a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, physicians spend approximately 16 minutes per patient visit working with electronic health records (EHR). Of this time, an average of 33% was spent on chart review, 24% on documentation, and 17% on ordering.

Although nearly all hospitals use professional reference questionnaires during the credentialing process, few have a policy that addresses appropriate use of the questionnaire. Such a policy should answer the following questions.

There's less than two weeks left to take advantage of our early bird pricing for the 2020 CRC Symposium in New Orleans! This year's symposium delivers 2 full days of engaging education and training to MSPs, medical staff leaders, and quality directors in credentialing environments spanning the care continuum. Top industry experts impart fresh insight and actionable strategies for developing and sustaining effective credentialing, privileging, competence assessment, and medical staff governance processes amid constant changes to healthcare service delivery and reimbursement. Click here to save $100 with special early bird pricing through February 7, 2020. CRC members save an additional $100!

CRC members can peruse all of the online articles from the December 201 issues of CRCJ and MSB—as well as full-color PDFs—here:

• CRCJ
• MSB

Neonatal-perinatal medicine is the subspecialty of pediatrics that involves the diagnosis and treatment of high-risk newborns. Neonatologists, the practitioners of neonatal-perinatalmedicine, are trained to identify high-risk pregnancies and are familiar with the methods used to evaluate fetal well-being and maturation. They are also knowledgeable about the factors that may compromise the fetus during the intrapartum period and can recognize the signs of fetal distress.

Find out what’s happening in the world of federal healthcare regulations by reviewing some recent headlines from across the country.

Any physician opening up a new practice is likely concerned with practice management. While planning the operational and logistical aspects of running a practice, which is essentially a business, there is an important area that is often overlooked: leadership. Although medical leadership is still not as common a term as it should be—primarily since physicians are never explicitly taught to be leaders—it is now increasingly used because of the high tendency of physicians to turn to independent medical startups.