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News about Altus, AltusLearn, and the greater medical education industryWho is an Eligible Provider? An Easy Penalty to Avoid
Do you know without a doubt exactly who all of your PQRS Eligible Providers (EPs) are? Would you be willing to bet $18,000 per provider on it? For a practice of five physician and five non-physician EPs (Pas, NPs, PTs, RDs, etc.) an innocent misunderstanding could mean a $180,000 stroke against the entire practice.
Read More →Motivate Your Employees to Meet Education Requirements
We spend a lot of time talking with medical facility managers about how tough it is to keep a staff current on their facility’s compliance and continuing education (CE) requirements. Can you recognize these three common roadblocks to compliance?
Read More →How to Avoid PQRS and Value Based Modifier Penalties
Medicare’s Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) is significantly impacting practices’ finances two ways in 2015 and beyond. Practices of all sizes can easily file PQRS quality measures to both avoid penalties and qualify for maximum incentive payments. Here’s what you need to know now to protect your reimbursements.
Read More →Racial Bias in Healthcare?
In the Aug. 11th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) an article entitled “Racial Bias in Health Care and Health Challenges and Opportunities” appeared. The article was co-authored by The Joint Commission’s medical director, Ronald Wyatt, MD, and David R. Williams, PhD. The article calls for “immediate action to address racial bias throughout the health care system.”
Read More →The Benefits of MRSO / MRMD Training and Credentialing
Between the years 2000 and 2013, MRI utilization increased 114%(IMV Medical Information Division data). In that same time period, the number of MR safety incidents reported to the FDA increased 487% (FDA MAUDE database data). As a note, it is estimated than less than 20% of MR safety incidents are actually reported to the FDA. In 2002, the year after the death of 6 year old Michael Colombini in an MR accident…
Read More →Free Webinar: MRI Safety Understanding and Eliminating Risk at Your Facility
AltusCampus would like to thank all the great healthcare professionals for your continued support because without it AltusCampus would not be the continuing education marketplace it is today.
With that said, we are proud to offer a Free “MRI Safety: Understanding and Eliminating Risk at Your Facility” webinar for 1 Category A CEU credit…
Read More →Succeeding and Failing with XR29 Standard
The new joint commission standards for CT went into effect July 1. The new requirements will put a substantial strain on radiology departments. Healthcare facilities across the country are either replacing equipment or updating equipment to bring it up to the new standard.
Dr. Myron Pozniak, a professor of radiology at the University of Wisconsin and his group conducted a survey of 106 healthcare facilities that provide CT regarding their readiness to meet the new standards…
Read More →Evaluating Risk of Repeated Gadolinium Use
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is evaluating the risk of gadolinium based contrast agents (GBCAs) leaving brain deposits with repeated use. GBCAs are used to help detect abnormalities in organs, tissues and blood vessels in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans. Recent studies and publications have reported deposits remain in the brain of patients that have received four or more MRI scans using GBCAs years after receiving the last dose…
Read More →CMS is proposing cuts to Radiation Therapy and Oncology by 3-9%
On July 8, 2015 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a rule that updates payment policies, payment rates, and quality provisions for services under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) on or after January 1, 2016. The rule also finalizes changes to the quality reporting initiatives associated with PFS payments, including the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS)…
Read More →Proposed 2016 CMS HOPPS Rule Would Require More Code Bundling
July1, CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) issued a proposed rule with a 60 day comment period for Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (HOPPS) Coverage Year (CY) 2016. The proposed rule would require more code bundling pertaining to radiology.
The goal of the rule change is to create single encounter payment for comprehensive ambulatory payment classifications (APC’s) that match a single HOPPS episode of care…
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