The reality for most businesses, including medical practices, is that the business owner or another employee is tasked with the uncomfortable role of terminator. If the termination is handled improperly, the former employee may lodge a complaint against you. In fact, wrongful termination charges filed with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose last year for the seventh consecutive year.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) is described as the most sweeping health care legislation passed in the U.S. since Medicare’s implementation in 1965. The health reform law is already changing the health care system, but the most profound modifications are yet to come. The law will affect otolaryngologists’ practices in many ways, both direct and indirect. Here are some areas of the law to consider.
October 1, 2013 should be on the mind of every physician in the U.S. That is the day when a new diagnostic coding system will be instituted, the first such change since 2003. The implementation’s aftermath is predicted to be anywhere from a normal day at the office to financial Armageddon.
Oral appliances may work better than CPAP for some patients
Every otolaryngology group needs a chance to evaluate its organization outside the frenetic pace of day-to-day patient care. A practice retreat provides the opportunity to assess your operations, examine your mission and conduct strategic planning in a setting where physicians are relaxed and undistracted.
What’s more important, your computer’s hardware or its software? You tell me: What’s more important, your heart or your lungs? Obviously, if you’re going to function, you need both. The same is true for electronic medical record (EMR) and electronic health record (EHR) software: Your hardware is mission-critical to the success of your electronic records, and this is not the place to compromise.
Residents in the general surgery program at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., participate in monthly “pizza grand rounds,” in which they discuss ethics-fraught situations they encounter. Some of the situations are the subjects of papers published in Surgery. Here are summaries of a few of those published situations. The papers intentionally do not mention the actions ultimately taken, so that the attention remains on the principles and questions involved.
Certain well-established care delivery models for otolaryngologists have long defined the specialty. But, like pharmacology, surgical techniques and treatment therapies, practice models evolve. And while traditional models continue to dominate the scope of most otolaryngology practices, the field is seeing a gradual shift to new constructs. Among them…
In my January 2011 column (“A Seller’s Market: How to prepare your practice for sale to a hospital”), I described the growing trend of physicians selling their practices to hospitals and large health systems and then working for the hospital or health system. This trend is expected to continue in full force through 2012. As I noted in my January article, the physician’s post-sale arrangement is the driver for the growth of the physician’s practice within the hospital or health system.