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Looking at the 2018 calendar and working on a couple of presentations for the EPI Conference I decided to shift gears and calculate the financial impact of MACRA.

This decision to look into the MACRA’s financial impact was not a sudden impulse but the consequence of a concern I have. After analyzing last year’s findings from the HIPAA Security Risk Analysis, I was worried that eligible clinicians and support personnel are still not ready for MACRA. Perhaps it is because they don’t think is necessary to do them every year. Potentially they don’t know that this is a legal requirement…

On January 2, 2018 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a new data submission system for eligible providers who participate in Medicare’s Quality Payment Program also known as MACRA (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015).

The system is designed to accept measures for the 2017 Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) track. The plan is to provide eligible providers with one portal where they can submit all data through one platform. Currently this portal may be found in the qpp.cms.gov website.

Data for the 2017 year may be submitted between January 2, 2018 to March 31, 2018…

December 31^st, 2017 was the last day to collect data for Medicare’s new Quality Payment Program. The next key date is March 31, 2018 as this date marks the last day to submit data to Medicare. Of course, the next logical question is: what to report.

Let’s simply cover the MIPS track as trying to explain MIPS and APMS may be too much for this setting. Under MIPS (Merit-based Incentive Payment System) there are four categories (categories):

• Quality
• Advancing Care Information
• Improvement Activities
• Cost

Quality. Quality is a key category as the same counts for as…

As part of the Certified HIPAA Security Officer Bootcamp and the Certified HIPAA Security Business program, I have been spending quite a lot of time doing research. This research allowed to do an informal assessment of the state of compliance in the United States. Sad to say that what I found was depressing at best. Let me give you a taste of our findings:

1. We found quite a number of experts with all kind of acronyms after their name but few I will recommend to conduct a basic assessment or training.

Lots of Security Risk Assessments that are

The MACRA due date to finalize capturing measures is December 31^st, 2017. Failure to capture these measures will have a cascading result as it regards to Medicare payment. I actually have been doing presentations about this topic for quite some time now and the only shock I have experienced is the knowledge level of my audiences. To make matters worse, I was looking at Medicare’s guidance documents via CMS website and I was very impressed with their efforts until the point I realized that some of the information was not necessarily accurate. Of course, when you consider that the new

Do you know what a HIPAA Security Risk Analysis entails? Do you know the difference between the Evaluation Standard (§164.308(a)(8)) under the HIPAA Security Administrative section and the HIPAA Security Risk Analysis Standard (§164.308(a)(1)(ii)(A)) under the same section? Do you have an idea of the expertise needed to conduct a HIPAA Security Risk Analysis?

Let’s just start with something basic: is the proper terminology to use when talking about this topic a Security Risk Analysis or a Security Risk Assessment? Even under the Department of Health and Human Services guidance you can find both terms use and referring to the…

In a recent enforcement action, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) emphasized the importance of proactive security measures to protect electronic protected health information (ePHI) in accordance with the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules.

What is MACRA?

MACRA is the acronym for the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015.  The legislation sets a roadmap for the future of physician reimbursement from Medicare.

By now we hope that all healthcare professionals and organizations recognize the term MACRA and what it really means. Yet, it seems that the majority of the affected population still fails to understand the importance of this term and the fact that they are running out of time to prevent a future reduction in payments.

MACRA is all about numbers and while the options are daunting the beauty of the system is that Providers and organizations have choices as it relates to the measures they will be accountable for. For example, under the quality measure we only have to choose…

Last year, health data breaches affected more than 27 million patient records.

The healthcare industry was the victim of 88% of all ransomware attacks in U.S. industries last year, according to Solutionary, an NTT Group security company.

Children’s Medical Center of Dallas was recently fined $3.2 million over HIPAA violations.

We do not want to scare anyone, but cybersecurity is a real thing and based on the frequency of these attacks and their consequences we need to consider cybersecurity an important part of our daily routine.

Let’s look at this from another angle, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability…