New Jersey failed to submit a revised plan by last Thursday’s deadline for using a federal grant to help uninsured citizens receive medical coverage. The $7.6 million Affordable Care Act grant, intended to assist the state with setting up its own insurance marketplace, has expired and is now forfeit, according to the U.S.
February 26, 2014 | By Lawrence G |
Section 179 of the IRS Tax Code allows a business to deduct the full purchase price of certain types of financed or leased equipment and software for the current tax year. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), as well as other stimulus acts including 2013’s American Taxpayer Relief Act, have increased the Section 179 deduction limit,
November 15, 2013 | By Lawrence G |
AHMC Healthcare, based in Alhambra, CA, reported that the theft of two laptops has resulted in 729,000 patients’ protected health information (PHI) being compromised. This is the 11th largest HIPAA breach so far.
Surveillance video showed that a transient broke into an administrative office on October 12th and made off with two password-protected laptop computers,
October 29, 2013 | By Lawrence G |
Almost exactly one year ago, Hurricane Sandy did major damage in our New York/New Jersey area. Whether you believe in global warming or not, no matter where your office is located, we can’t deny that storms are increasing in frequency and force year after year. It is sad that we keep seeing practices losing valuable data every week,
October 22, 2013 | By Lawrence G |
Cogent Healthcare announced last week that a third-party vendor’s security lapse left patients’ Protected Health Information (PHI) exposed on the Internet. While no financial or Social Security Number information was included, Cogent is offering a year-long subscription to identity theft protection and credit monitoring services to the 32,000 affected patients.
Medical transcriptions vendor M2ComSys,
August 14, 2013 | By Lawrence G |
The compliance date for ICD-10 implementation is just fourteen months away, and the new code set is inspiring negativity in some. With over five times as many codes as the current ICD-9 set, and a radically different structure to boot, “ICD-10 will be one of the most significant changes the physician practice community has ever undertaken –
August 9, 2013 | By Lawrence G |
With the adoption of any new technology, there will be a perfect bell curve each time. However, EMR adoption was accelerated by the Medicare EHR Incentive Program, also known as Meaningful Use. By providing a financial incentive, Meaningful Use sped the process up by approximately 7-10 years.
The maximum incentive possible from Medicare in 2009-2011 was $44,000.
July 17, 2013 | By Lawrence G |
A recent alert from the Department of Homeland Security warns that approximately 300 medical devices from 40 different vendors contain hard-coded passwords. Billy Rios and Terry McCorkle, technical directors and researchers at security vendor Cylance, discovered the “backdoor passwords” in devices such as patient monitors, ventilators, defibrillators, infant incubators, and lab equipment. Some of the devices can be interfaced with EMR software such as Lytec MD or Medisoft Clinical.
July 1, 2013 | By Lawrence G |
A recent study published in Academic Medicine indicates that under 25 percent of doctors graduating from medical school go into primary care. The researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services and the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care suggest that the country faces a shortage of primary care physicians and that it will only get worse without fundamental changes.
June 24, 2013 | By Lawrence G |
PQRS is yet another acronym that doctors are hearing a lot lately; to my surprise, however, I see that most doctors either opt out because of how complicated it is, or think they are already reporting on it but are not. Regardless of which side of the fence you are on,
June 10, 2013 | By Lawrence G |
