Practice Management

This year, physicians can expect to find it easier to get medical malpractice insurance and to pay lower rates for it than in the past.

Number of disciplinary actions against doctors fell for the third straight year in 2007.

Clinicians surveyed 1,039 women who delivered at Robert Wood Johnson University, ob/gyn division regarding what women want from an ob/gyn practice.

Contemporary OBGYN offers several practical tools to help solve everyday problems, including a a more evidence-based search engine, a coding counselor, and a guide to pay for performance programs.

The government, nonprofit hospitals, insurers, and technology companies have been striving to get doctors and patients to embrace electronic and personal health records.

In a survey of faculty and resident physicians at three teaching hospitals, researchers found that 92% of 338 respondents would report a hypothetical error it it resulted in major harm.

Here's how to dissect EHR bids to make sure you're getting the best deal.

Recent articles attest to a growing interest in an alternative way to provide reimbursement for health-care services in both the United States and Great Britain. Individual physicians, multispecialty groups, and hospitals are rewarded for meeting pre-established quality and/or expense targets for their services.

At some point you may need to consider merging the practice into a hospital or larger group. Like all processses of growth, merging medical practices can involve risk and a certain amount of pain. Here's how to prepare yourself for the transition.

Think of this legal expert's advice as your personal GPS for deftly navigating a maze of employment law challenges and preventing costly litigation.

To preserve or enhance your income, you need to master the local medical marketplace.

Although there are many advantages of solo practices, including total autonomy and not having to compromise in the practice's decisions or share in its successes, for me the disadvantages were much greater.

The Internet has empowered individuals who can now access a huge treasure chest of information quickly. This new age has extraordinary implications for ob/gyns.

We need to define shift mentality simply as a time commitment, not as a measure of our level of care.

The stiff-upper-lip approach to dealing with medical errors doesn't help your practice, your patients, or you.

Tempted to tell patients when you've made an error but afraid that too much honesty isn't the best policy? Here's how to do it safely.

In eleventh-hour negotiations before Congress ended its session last year, legislators found funding to prevent a scheduled 5% cut in Medicare reimbursements to physicians and provide additional payment to those who report quality measures. While the reprieve is good news for 2007, it will not roll over into 2008. Instead, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the recent tax and health bill will result in a 10% cut in Medicare payment rates next year, according to Modern Healthcare (1/8/2007).

Despite efforts in 2006 to reconcile two significantly different Senate and House bills on health information technology, Congress this year hopes to create new legislation that both chambers can agree on. And the new Congress-with a Democratic majority-";will likely pay a large part in determining how information technology priorities will be handled," reported American Medical News (1/1-8/2007).

Information about how well pay-for-performance programs are doing within commercial HMOs might help the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is considering adopting this approach for Medicare reimbursement. To that end, Boston researchers conducted a survey of 252 HMOs from 41 metropolitan areas across the country to identify the traits of these incentive programs.

Will the employers-physicians, hospitals or other covered entities-also be held accountable and subject to prosecution? That's what a 2005 Department of Justice memo seemed to imply.

Thanks to a ruling by Michigan's Supreme Court, physicians in the state may now sue hospitals and peer review committees for wrongful peer review. The high court's ruling overturns almost 25-year-old case law, which kept courts from getting involved in hospitals' staffing decisions because of its lack of expertise. As a result, physicians' claims of unfair peer review were often rejected.

Reimbursement for the HPV vaccine; Dealing with sales reps; ER coverage

What's holding you back? Cost? Worries about managing pain or complications? An expert debunks common excuses for not doing more office-based procedures and explains why you need both U/S and diagnostic hysteroscopy-and the rewards you can reap from taking your practice in this direction.

See our NEW department! Have a Practice Management question you need answered? Send it to cog@advanstar.com and Dr. Hayworth will consider it for a future column.

Florida lawmakers have been busy lately trying to ensure tort reform in medical malpractice cases, according to Medical Liability Monitor (5/2006). Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, for one, signed into law a bill that would require physicians and businesses to pay only the amount of damages according to their level of responsibility-not their financial ability to pay.

In our final series installment, Dr. Hayworth discusses establishing a compensation system, investing in staff training, whether to bring on fellow physicians as partners or employees, and much more.

At least that's what Clement J. McDonald, MD, emphasized in an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine (4/4/06). Presenting an actual case, in which two patients were misidentified when a mix-up occurred with their bar-coded identification wristbands, McDonald drew several conclusions to improve risk management

Doing so may actually enhance the patient-physician relationship, according to a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine (3/27/06).

Watching his state's medical care system crumble and many of hispartners shutter their practices spurred one Mississippi ob/gyn totake a personal stand on tort reform. His run for elected officewas successful-in more ways than one.

What right does a teenager have to confidential health care? What influence does HIPAA have on that right? How you apply the answers in your practice could determine whether an adolescent seeks health services-or forgoes necessary care.