Articles and Blogs

NATIONAL Readmissions penalty doing little to slow the spinning of hospitals’ revolving doors Joint replacement penalties for rehospitalizations may have hit their limit 3 things to know about physician salary The Impact of a Hospital Post-Acute Care Program on Value-Based Care 10 health systems with strong finances What Telemedicine’s Growth Rate Means for the Industry…Read More

On July 5, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit issued an opinion enforcing Supreme Court precedent that the False Claims Act (“FCA”) should be reserved for true fraud against the government—not “garden-variety regulatory violations.” In U.S. ex rel. Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP v. BASF Corp.,[1] the D.C. Circuit reviewed a…Read More

For-profit businesses are generally organized and operated to maximize shareholder value. For this reason, for-profit organizations have inherent limitations in pursuing goals or purposes that conflict with increasing the bottom line for shareholders. While for-profit companies have traditionally had these limitations, in recent years, many for-profit organizations have been presented with a new legal structure…Read More

On June 12, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit joined the Second, Sixth and Eighth Circuits in determining that without evidence of an underlying physiological disorder, a plaintiff’s weight does not qualify as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”). In the Seventh Circuit case Richardson v. Chicago Transit…Read More

NATIONAL How to avoid the legal risks of telemedicine HHS OCR Clarifies When Health Plans Can Share PHI Under HIPAA Brigham and Women’s, Emory and more join radiology AI pilot program Hospital groups argue CMS wage index proposal flawed How 4 health IT leaders balance strategy with execution: key thoughts from Ed Marx, Dr. Maia…Read More

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) agreed on June 28, 2019, to delay implementation of the recently finalized Conscience Rule. We wrote about the Final Conscience Rule and its potential impact on health care employers and organizations in our recent blog. The Conscience Rule prohibits discrimination of individuals who refuse to participate…Read More

In a previous article, we reported on CMS’s implementation of new billing edits that will Return to Provider any hospital UB-04 claims that identify a service location that is not an exact match to a Medicare-enrolled location identified in Provider Enrollment, Chain and Ownership System (“PECOS”). As previously reported, those edits were scheduled to be activated…Read More

On June 27, 2019, the last day of its 2018 term, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its third opinion in recent years addressing “the circumstances under which a police officer may administer a warrantless blood alcohol concentration (“BAC”) test to a motorist who appears to have been driving under the influence of alcohol.” Mitchell v….Read More

Senate Committee Advances Major Health Legislative Package The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (“HELP”) Committee passed a wide-ranging bill focusing on lowering health care costs to the chamber’s floor. This legislation is one of the only major health care bills that stands a chance at passing Congress this year. The measure aims to prevent…Read More

This is another article in a series discussing the complete overhaul of Part 483 to Title 42 of the Code of Federal Regulations the Requirements for States and Long-Term Care Facilities (“Final Regulations”) by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”). To view other articles in this series, click here. Beginning on November 28, 2019,…Read More