It’s time to begin preparing H-1B petitions for an early April filing and Oct. 1, 2015, effective date.
Advance planning is crucial. Due to the improving economy and the backlog of demand from April 2014, the H-1B cap will likely be exceeded again this year. Employers that fail to file H-1B petitions on April 1 may lose the opportunity to employ the intended foreign national candidate.
A Dec. 1 Strafford webinar on the legal and regulatory challenges of Ebola will feature five Husch Blackwell attorneys. The 90-minute CLE webinar with interactive Q&A will provide guidance to healthcare counsel and their clients in addressing HIPAA and EMTALA concerns when treating Ebola patients.
The panel will discuss state and federal mandatory reporting requirements, employment issues and lessons learned from the first U.S. Ebola cases.
Many pediatric hospitals have an opportunity to be a lead provider of patient care and administrative services to patients in states that are outsourcing Medicaid program administration to managed care companies. Winn Halverhout presented on this topic for an AHLA webinar titled “Innovative Pediatric Hospital/Provider Partnerships.”
Thirty-seven states currently outsource all or part of their Medicaid administration to managed care companies. Many states are dividing into regions and awarding Medicaid contracts in each region to only one or a handful of managed care companies, which creates opportunities for pediatric providers that MCCs regard as critical providers within a service region. Pediatric hospitals are well-positioned to be the lead provider if they can build a critical mass of physicians and other pediatric care providers in the contract region.
The Federation of State Medical Boards recently endorsed a model policy that addresses the proper use of telemedicine services. Only a few weeks later, a not-for-profit foundation released a report highlighting the benefits of telemedicine and making recommendations for telehealth services. It’s no surprise that telehealth and telemedicine have been in the news with increasing frequency given that the demand for telemedicine services are rising sharply. According to a Law360 article, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd. estimates that 75 million digital doctor visits will occur this year in North America.
For many years, healthcare providers – particularly children’s hospitals – took comfort in a belief held widely throughout the healthcare industry that the Stark Law did not apply to Medicaid. That belief has now been challenged by several district court cases involving alleged False Claims Act violations, most recently in U.S. v. All Children’s Health System.
In a recent article in Health Value Digest, Tiffany Hetland explored two items a hospital should have on its checklist when acquiring a physician practice: a billing and coding audit and a review of documentation practices. The article is below.
Hospital acquisitions of physician practices have been on the rise for some time. At…
The HHS OIG released its Work Plan for FY 2014 three months ago and is hard at work investigating the issues highlighted in its annual publication. The OIG’s annual Work Plan lists current and new projects it will address during 2014, and is an excellent source for healthcare facilities to use in identifying potential compliance risk areas. The Work Plan has a number of items that impact children’s hospitals. Whether you immediately added these issues to your organization’s list of potential risk areas or still haven’t had the opportunity to review this year’s Work Plan, we recommend that you do not lose sight of these issues.
A deluge of patent applications were filed at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office on the day before central provisions of the new America Invents Act (AIA) went into effect on March 16, 2013. This rush to file indicates many inventors wish to preserve their patent status under the pre-AIA provisions.
The first-to-file provisions apply to any patent application that contains OR CONTAINED AT ANY TIME a claim having an effective filing date on or after March 16, 2013, and also apply to any patent application claiming priority of another application/patent that contains OR CONTAINED AT ANY TIME such a claim. America Invents Act § 3(n)(1) (emphasis added).
Are you wondering how much to pay your pediatric cardiologist? Or perhaps whether the compensation another pediatric subspecialty is demanding is justifiable? A recent article in the In-House Counselor, a publication of the American Health Lawyers Association, may provide guidance.
The article, which was written by Tom Schnack of Seim Johnson and was edited by…
This article was originally published by the American Health Lawyers Association. Copyright 2014, American Health Lawyers Association, Washington, DC. Reprint permission granted.
Recently, the Obama Administration released its fiscal year 2015 budget proposal, which includes several proposals of special interest to children’s hospitals. The Budget proposes several new and strategic investments in the nation’s health care…
