Avoid even the suspicion of fraud At the risk of sounding alarmist, when it comes to compliance, it’s now crunch time. New laws have given the government—and private whistleblowers (which can include competitors, disgruntled current or former employees and others)—unprecedented power to cripple the cash flow of any ambulance service, public or private, even when […]
The “traditional” responsibilities of EMS medical directors have been well-defined over the years. These include issues that can best be described as clinical oversight of EMS, including protocol development, online medical direction, provider training and skill verification, oversight of controlled substances and quality-improvement activities. However, there’s a great deal of untapped potential for EMS agencies […]
Although a growing trend in health care is resulting in more state laws requiring disclosure of certain types of medical errors, those laws do not appear to have filtered down to EMS. Nevertheless, a legal and ethical debate continues over the wisdom of EMS agencies voluntarily disclosing errors to patients or family members. At the […]
Rule includes new screening measures for ambulance services On Sept. 23, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services proposed new regulations that will substantially enhance compliance obligations for ambulance services. The proposed rule would implement several provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the federal health-care reform law, which will provide new “fraud […]
On July 14, 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a proposed rule that will substantially change many of the current HIPAA regulations. These proposed amendments would implement the HIPAA changes made by the federal Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which became law last year. In addition, because […]
There’s a saying that if you keep your old clothes in the closet long enough, eventually they’ll come back into style. For some reason, this analogy keeps popping into my head as I listen to the public debate on the subject of health-care reform. In 1993, the Clinton administration came to office amid Democrats’ great […]
Doug Wolfberg is an attorney and founding partner of Page, Wolf-berg & Wirth, LLC, the National EMS industry law firm, widely viewed as the leading experts in Medicare and compliance law for the ambulance industry. Contact him via the firm’s Web site at www.pwwemslaw.com.
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