On October 14, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded the list of telehealth services covered by Medicare during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. CMS also announced it would be providing additional support to state Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) agencies in delivering telehealth services. CMS added the telehealth services using, for the first time, an expedited process that does not involve rulemaking which had been established by CMS in…

Health care providers and contractors continue to be a popular target for hackers. Recently, CHSPSC LLC (CHSPSC), which provides various services to hospitals and clinics indirectly owned by Community Health Systems, Inc. of Tennessee, agreed to pay $2,300,000 to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in settlement of potential violations of HIPAA’s Privacy and Security Rules. The OCR investigation and settlement stemmed from a data breach affecting over six million people.…

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced yesterday that it has settled five investigations in its HIPAA Rights to Access Initiative (Initiative), which it announced would be an enforcement priority for it starting in 2019. The Initiative is “to support individuals’ right to timely access to their health records at a reasonable cost under the HIPAA Privacy Rule.” The addition of the five recent settlements brings the total to seven for OCR’s enforcement of the…

On August 24, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced an “extension of the timeline” for publication of a final rule addressing changes to the Physician Self-Referral Law (or Stark Law) regulations.  In its announcement, CMS set a new deadline of August 31, 2021 for publication of a final rule.…

Excerpt of a contributed article published in Medical Economics on August 13, 2020. The public health emergency (PHE) caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in systemic changes throughout the nation’s health care system. Almost overnight, health systems, providers and the government were forced to collaborate to ‘stand up’ field hospitals, testing sites, and quarantine procedures, while postponing or cancelling certain elective procedures and ceasing in-person encounters. One of the most significant developments in the…

On July 14, 2020 Connecticut Governor Lamont issued Executive Order No. 7HHH, in which the Governor modified state law to enable the Commissioner of the Department of Public Health (DPH) to temporarily suspend licensure, registration and certification requirements for certain DPH-regulated practitioners for the duration of the state public health and civil preparedness emergency.  Notably, in that Executive Order, the Governor stated that “healthcare providers from outside Connecticut have greatly enhanced the provision of…

It doesn’t matter in which  state you are located, how many patients you treat, what kind of medicine you practice or how many employees you have, if you are a health care provider, you are being targeted and hackers are successful in victimizing you. That’s my take on the recent Becker’s Health IT article that lists 66 healthcare providers around the country that have suffered a cyber-attack in the form of malware, ransomware or a…