Articles and Blogs

CMS Will Create Five-Star Ratings for Hospitals and Other Health Providers The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) recently announced it will create a five-star rating system for hospitals, home health agencies and dialysis providers.  CMS plans to begin publishing star ratings by the end of 2014 or early 2015.  The ratings will be published…Read More

Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration continues its efforts to communicate, address and refine questions and issues related to the upcoming Medicaid coverage changes. 

Executive Summary The Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) released an April 2014 report sharing the results of its investigation of home health agencies’ (“HHAs’”) face-to-face documentation.  The report details both the manner and method of OIG’s investigation and a number of its findings.  OIG noted that 32% of the home health claims did not have the requisite…Read More

Following recent news about the Heartbleed exploit, CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based security services company, challenged hackers to use Heartbleed to get private encryption keys that would unlock secure data. It reported multiple winners to its challenge. By obtaining the private key for an SSL/TLS certificate, an attacker could set up a fake website that passes the…Read More

Executive Summary April 16, 2014 is National Healthcare Decisions Day. The goal of the day is to encourage Americans to think and talk about their health care goals and communicate their health care decisions by executing advance health care directives. 

Wisconsin has joined the ever-increasing number of states legislating against employers’ access to employees’ and applicants’ social media sites.  On Tuesday, April 8, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed the Wisconsin Social Media Protection Act, 2013 Wisconsin Act 208 (the “Act”), into law, which prohibits both public and private employers, regardless of size, from requesting or…Read More

Burwell to Replace Sebelius as the Next HHS Secretary On April 10, Kathleen Sebelius announced she is resigning as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”). President Obama will nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”), as her replacement. The White House will now begin…Read More

On Tuesday, April 8, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed three bills that are of particular interest to the health care industry. 

Three federal regulators have released a long-awaited report proposing the framework for regulation of health information technology (“Health IT”).  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”), the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (“ONC”) and the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) are accepting comments on their proposed risk-based regulatory framework until July 7,…Read More

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”), the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (“ONC”) and the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) are accepting comments on their recently issued final FDASIA Health IT Report, entitled Proposed Strategy and Recommendations for a Risk-Based Framework. The agencies are seeking public comment on the questions below. …Read More