Medical Staff Services

Last week, I traveled to Nashville, Tennessee along with a few of my colleagues for HealthStream Summit—an annual conference empowering healthcare professionals to achieve better outcomes in the delivery of patient care. Patient care and safety is what drives everything that we do at PreCheck, which is why we’ve partnered with a company like HealthStream that shares our core values for impacting healthcare.

I’d like to share with you some highlights from one of my favorite sessions that I attended this summer at the 2013 American Health Lawyers Association’s Annual Meeting.  Janice Dinner of Banner Health and Karen Owens of Coppersmith, Schermer & Brockelman delivered a very insightful presentation on “Hospital Employed Physicians: How Medical Staffs are Coping with the New Reality.”  While there are many articles and papers out there that highlight the growing trend of physician employment, this presentation took us deeper than the typical high level view.

Now that it’s the fourth quarter of 2013, it’s time to start looking at your year-end checklist so you can get everything done before this year comes to a close — and set yourself up for success in 2014.

Medical staff services managers have a lot to do in the coming months. We’ve created a checklist to help make sure you don’t miss anything important.

One common misconception among medical staff services departments is the assumption that the state medical license boards proactively discipline physicians with a history of misconduct. After all, don’t most boards require criminal background checks before granting licensure? While this is certainly a valid point, various studies have recently indicated that medical license boards are not very efficient in taking action against physicians with misconduct.

We began this month by discussing the topic of physician impairment and the call for drug screening standards in healthcare. A comprehensive employee drug screening program is a great tool to mitigate risk and reduce overall costs for your organization. Whether you are reviewing your organization's drug screening policy or starting from scratch, here are five recent articles covering advice for employers, industry reports and survey findings concerning drug testing in the workplace. 

In our featured article last month we addressed the issue of the importance of performing routine criminal background checks for physicians as a condition of licensure and appointment. We discussed how these checks could play a vital role in ensuring patient and workplace safety, and contribute to improved healthcare outcomes.

In May 2013, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a Special Advisory Bulletin concerning excluded individuals and entities. Within the advisory bulletin, the first in over a decade, the OIG alerted organizations receiving federal funding from Medicare that it is highly recommended that they monitor the OIG’s List of Excluded Individuals and Entities (LEIE) on a monthly basis in order to minimize their liability from civil monetary penalties.

Of the roughly 317 million people living in the United States today, about 12.4 million are arrested every year (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2011). That’s equivalent to almost the entire population of the state of Pennsylvania.

It’s 2AM and a devastating natural disaster has just stricken your city. Power is down in most areas. Massive flooding has obstructed major routes in and out of town, limiting the availability of emergency resources to affected locations. Hundreds are in need of immediate medical attention from first responders, emergency care providers, and physicians. Your facility is nearing capacity, and caregivers are struggling through the chaos to triage and treat the injured. Your hospital is in need of more physicians and surgeons.