Resources

Early this year at the Compliance and Healthcare Innovation Conference, hosted by EPI Conferences, one of the topics presented was cyber security. This presentation itself was quite interesting but the thing that I didn’t get until now was that most presenters referred to cyber security in their presentations.

Cyber security refers to the initiatives and efforts directed towards the protection of computer systems and networks against attacks, damage or unauthorized access. Normally these efforts include initiatives such as conducting security audits, installing software patches, auditing transactions between systems and networks and even encrypting systems, to mention a few.

Cyber attacks…

We are constantly doing research and applying the same towards what we should be doing to prepare. In a way we consider this effort and the product of the same our “Healthcare Business Priorities”.

Let’s backtrack and expand on this concept. The reality of the healthcare business is that it is in constant flux. Not only are there new techniques and protocols to help patients but also laws, regulations, technology and client behavior. In fact, if there is something that alerts us of issues, it is when we hear the phrase: “we had always done it this way”.

Face it…

After a year of preparation, we had the opportunity to participate in the EPI Compliance & Healthcare Innovation Conference. The event as you will hear from attendees was intense and well worth attending. There was so much information crammed that there is no way for any one person to retain all of it yet there are some lessons learned we can share with all.

Cannabis. This presentation was given by Dr. Joseph Rosado who cover benefits, licensing and medical benefits of cannabis. Among some of the benefits discussed included:

• Marijuana helps veterans suffering from PTSD.

It can be…

It has taken me three days to recover from the EPI Conference that took place at the Royal Pacific Resort in Orlando, Florida. The conference was designed to cover a HIPAA Security Bootcamp, a networking event and the actual topics for the conference. There was so much going on that I will not try to cover everything but simply provide a brief after action report.

HIPAA Security Bootcamp. Intense may not be the right word to describe this EPI Conference event but it may be somewhat close. The event started at 8:30 AM sharp and didn’t finish until 5:30 PM…

As the month of January comes to an end I’m looking at what is to come and what should be the Healthcare Business Priorities for 2018.

MACRA. For those that see Medicare patients and fall under Medicare’s new quality payment program we cannot under emphasize the need to report 2017 measures before March 31, 2018. At the same time, we strongly recommend starting to track the data for 2018 and staying in touch as these measures are already changing and we will not know the final 2018 measures for a while.

Business Plan. Healthcare Business Priorities for 2018 are not…

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