Pursuant to the Affordable Care Act, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently adopted a final rule implementing $1.1 billion in cuts to the Medicaid disproportionate share hospital (DSH) program in 2014 and 2015. The new rule reduces Medicaid DSH payments by $500 million in 2014 and $600 million in 2015.
There are several…
Adoption of EHR technologies has greatly increased as the result of the EHR Incentive Program. Touted as one of the necessary building blocks for creating integrated delivery systems, EHR is considered vital to improve health quality, efficiency and patient safety. The EHR Incentive Program has been very successful and CMS has awarded over $10…
During the recently concluded 2013 regular session, the Texas Legislature enacted Senate Bill 1191, which established new requirements for hospitals treating victims of sexual assault. The bill is primarily aimed at improving access to forensic examinations for survivors of sexual assault by ensuring that every Texas hospital with an emergency department has personnel who have basic training in forensic examinations. The changes are effective beginning Sept. 1, 2013.
SB 1191 sets out three new requirements for hospitals:
1. Any person who performs a forensic examination on a sexual assault survivor must have basic sexual assault forensic evidence collection training. Training approved or recognized by the appropriate licensing board satisfies this requirement.
2. Texas hospitals that have emergency departments, but which are not designated by a communitywide plan as the primary healthcare facility in the community for treating sexual assault providers, must:
a. Inform sexual assault survivors that the hospital is not a designated facility.
b. Provide sexual assault survivors with the name and location of a designated facility.
c. Inform survivors that they may choose to be transferred to a designated facility for care or receive care at the nondesignated facility.
d. If survivors choose to be transferred to the designated facility for care, stabilize and transfer the survivors to the designated facility after obtaining written, signed consent to do so.
Recent national tragedies have refocused the nation on an important question:
Can or should a physician face civil liability for failing to warn of the dangers posed by a patient who later commits violence?
Husch Blackwell attorneys Greg Minana and Justin Stephens addressed this question under Missouri law in an article published in the May/June issue of Missouri Medicine. In…
Are you still trying to understand the changes made in the HIPAA Omnibus Rule?
Do you want an opportunity to ask questions and hear how other providers are handing HIPAA issues?
Do you need a chance to brush up on your HIPAA knowledge and evaluate current strategies?
If so, then you should consider attending one…
Are healthcare providers at your facility texting patient information to each other? This type of communication is becoming more and more common, but such text messages are often in violation of HIPAA. To address this issue, Sprint announced last week that it is now offering two texting products that provide the proper security for PHI…
On June 14ththe Governor signed into law SB 1803. It amends Chapter 531 by limiting the Texas Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General’s (HHSC-OIG) ability to implement payment holds, improving providers’ rights to expedited appeals before the State Office of Administrative Hearings, redefining the liability for hearing costs, creating new requirements…
A trademark audit is at its most basic an asset inventory. But instead of tracking down and counting blood pressure monitors, otoscopes and scalpels you are tracking down words, phrases and pictures (logos) that you are using to promote your business to the public. And instead of checking and noting the condition of these items and culling out those that are beyond repair or use, your trademark auditor will review how the marks are being used to be sure such use is proper and all of these marks have been searched and cleared for use. It may also find that you are using marks that no longer conform to your desired public image or Mission Statement and that such marks need to be retired.
A trademark audit should do more than just look at the marks that the business believes it owns. A trademark audit should look at all of the company’s materials that are presented to the public and review them for any words, phrases and pictures (logos) that are used to identify your company’s goods and services. A trademark audit will often identify terms that the auditor views as trademarks that the company may not realize it is using. You might wonder – how can a company not know it is using a particular trademark? This could be because marketing designed and distributed a flyer or brochure but did not review the terms being used – possibly due to a short deadline or perhaps they thought it would only be used “once”. The audit may also identify terms that have been used for a long time that have simply fallen through the cracks.
Harvey Tettlebaum, a Husch Blackwell attorney specializing in healthcare law with an emphasis in post-acute care, contributed an article to the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Health & Life Sciences Law titled “Quality Measurements, Payment, and the Law: Disincentives to Physician-Patient Discussions of End-of-Life Care.” Here is the abstract of the article.
With …
A trademark is an adjective. It is not a noun or a verb. Why? Because, a trademark’s purpose is to identify the source or origin of a product, NOT to identify the product itself. You have gone to great lengths to find a mark that is not descriptive of your product, and we have discussed that generic marks can never be a trademark, so you do not now want to use your mark in such a way that you cause to become descriptive or generic.
This tends to be more a problem for the company coming out with a first-of-its-kind product. Consumers are already unsure what the product is, and without careful marketing that new moving stairway becomes an “escalator” (originally a trademark of Otis Elevator Company); all coin operated laundries become “laundromats” (originally a trademark of Westinghouse); and all rolling toys on a string are now “yo-yos” (although still a trademark in Canada).
Newer situations that almost resulted in a successful brand name becoming the generic term for the product itself include “KLEENEX® brand tissues;” “Band-Aid® brand bandages” and “Rollerblade ® brand in-line skates.” Yes, you want your brand to be successful; however, not to the point where it becomes synonymous with the product itself.
