Credentialing Resource Center needs your help! We are looking for experts in the field to tell us how their organization handles initial FPPE for low- and no-volume providers. Your tips and best practices could be featured in an upcoming article on Credentialing Resource Center. If you are interested, email editor Karen Kondilis, kkondilis@hcpro.com.

After receiving some internal feedback, a hospital system based in Philadelphia says it has reversed a policy that linked bonus pay for some physicians to referrals to its fundraising office.

Effective meeting management requires diplomacy and proven management techniques. Physician leaders should be well prepared for each meeting, and they should be able to identify reasonable objectives. Meetings should be as brief as possible while still accomplishing objectives.

As more hospitals merge into larger health systems, these systems will have to decide whether to maintain a separate medical staff at each hospital or to merge medical staffs—partially or fully. CMS announced in 2014 that medical staffs in the same health system functioning under a single-system governing body could unify and consolidate. This left hospitals and their medical staffs to decide if they should do so.

The foundation of the Physician Performance Pyramid, as described in Part 1, is to appoint competent physicians to the medical staff. The more time and effort that is spent here, the easier the rest of the medical staff leader’s job will be. If not enough time is devoted to selecting competent physicians, medical staff leaders will struggle unnecessarily to deal with challenges that should have been addressed at the very beginning of the process.