Archive for September, 2009
CP+ breakfast demo at NAMSS conference
We are pleased to extend you a personal invitation for a free demonstration of our exciting privileging software, CP+
Free Live Demonstration
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
7:00 to 8:30 a.m. PST
NAMSS Annual Conference in Reno, NV
Grand Sierra Resort and Casino
Nevada 6 and 7 rooms
Contest entry: OPPE forms for psychiatry
Thanks to Sharon Chaput, RN, CSHA, director of regulatory and quality management at Brattleboro Retreat in Brattleboro, VT, for sending in this OPPE indicator form and OPPE master grid. We here at HCPro have heard for several years now how tricky FPPE and OPPE can be, so we’re happy to share these forms, which can be adapted to meet the needs of any specialty.
“The Joint Commission surveyor told us this past June that this form is the best he has seen in the country,” Chaput writes.
Thanks for sharing, Sharon!
The Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium is just weeks away. Be sure to enter our contest to win two free seats before it’s too late!!
Contest entry: A simple organizational tool for credentialing specialists
Michael Gagne, a credentialing specialist at Hospital Physician Partners in Fort Lauderdale, FL, has developed a tool to make life easier for the MSPs.
Gagne explains that his job is to weed out applicants who do not meet the requirements of the hospital his company serves. For every physician who requests privileges, he verifies several items, including the physician’s hospital affiliations, previous insurance carrier, diploma, internship, and residency. Gagne turns this information over to the hospital at which the physician is requesting privileges, and the hospital then conducts its own primary source verification.
To make life easier for the MSPs at these facilities, Gagne includes with each application a CV addendum, which includes detailed contact information to help with the verification process.
The aging physician: Balancing safety, respect, and dignity
Physicians often enter their 60s practicing medicine full time, but as they inch their way toward 70, many start making significant adjustments to their schedules and scope of practice. Most of us acknowledge the affect aging has on our cognitive and motor skills, with the help of some not-so-subtle hints from our colleagues and loved ones. For some, it’s no big deal—there are so many ways to earn a livelihood inside and outside the healthcare profession that it seems fruitless to hold onto things that may no longer fit our professional goals, such as inpatient privileges. They gladly move into the ambulatory setting and are often relieved to enter a different phase of their professional lives. For others, however, this transition is not easy, and it may require the guidance and support of peers. For this reason, it is important for medical staff leaders to understand how to support and respect long serving colleagues while ensuring that patients are not inadvertently placed in jeopardy.
When I entered the practice of emergency medicine 30 years ago, there were always one or two physicians in their 80s who refused to give up their practices. More than once, I followed a physician suffering from dementia on his or her on rounds to discretely modify orders at the request and relief of the nursing staff. Some of the orders required minimal modification and some were lethal doses of inappropriate agents that the nursing staff had no intent of carrying out. This was our tradition—to support our loyal colleagues who had served their communities for decades, despite that we all knew this was not the right thing to do.
More talk of board certification
Yes, folks, the conversation regarding board certification as a measure of physician competency is till rolling. More of your colleagues have written in to share their opinions. Here’s what they have to say:
“Board certification is obviously one item of many that should be considered in the evaluation of a physician, either at initial appointment or at re-appointment. However, that is not its only purpose. More important in this discussion is whether a hospital medical staff should require board certification, independent of any use for credentialing. Requiring board certification makes a statement to the medical staff, to the board, and to the public that the hospital is trying to be the best that it can be. That institutional attitude counts for a lot.
“Our own healthcare system is going to be visited soon by the investigation team for the Baldridge Award. Why should we try for such an award? Just the effort needed to apply for the award makes a statement about the institutional attitude, whether or not we receive the award. Cultivate that attitude, build and expand on it, and let that attitude be expressed in everything we do. The plaque on the wall, the congratulatory letter in the doctor’s file, the monthly newsletter announcement that one of our doctors recently was re-certified: all of these help to tell the world who we are and what we stand for. Just as important is that they tell us who we are.”
~Van Swan, MD
Presbyterian Medical Group
“Rather than the idea that medical staffs and boards do not consider that certification is a reflection of physician competence, I believe they are reluctant to enforce the regulation for other reasons. I have seen these groups not enforce the decision at the time of appointment or reappointment because the physician was needed or has been a loyal colleague. For the most part, the regulations began with grandfathering of the current medical staff membership, which may make some believe an unfairness exists. I believe that the few hospitals that enforce this requirement have an higher quality medical staff. Even though I was in an administrative position in 2000 at the age of 70, I re-certified in internal medicine. This did require the appropriate time commitment, something that busy practitioners may find difficult to do.
“I also have noticed that committees or boards sometimes opt to extend deadlines for individual medical staff members to pass their boards. We had a bylaw that indicated the requirement to have board certification or the equivalent. The equivalent was hard to define and carry out. A member of our bylaws committee suggested a procedure that he had seen in the orthopedic association that required a review of office records. This did not work out.”
~Francis M. Wilson MD, FACP
Retired Chief Medical Officer
St. John Health
You can find more food for thought about board certification here.
Contest entry: Go green and improve patient safety
Jenna Duch, medical staff coordinator at Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio, submitted a suggestion to the Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium contest that we wanted to share because it will help save the environment. Duch puts all of the medical staff orientation materials onto a USB key rather than stuffing several trees’ worth of paper into cumbersome binders. She includes hyperlinks on the agenda page to guide medical staff members through all of the documents and help them find specific information.
“Now, we don’t have to print binders with copies of all the material included, such as bylaws, rules, regs, staff roster, etc. Think of the money and time we save by simply dropping electronic files on a drive instead of printing binder after binder. And the new provider gets a free USB key to use whenever and for whatever. So far, we like how this is going,” Duch writes.
Duch adds that the medical staff puts patient safety first by requiring new providers to participate in a safety-focused medical staff orientation within the first year of their appointment. They cannot reapply if they do not attend. “We want to ensure that our patients are treated the best, so setting the bar high from the beginning is what we hope to do.”
Thanks for the suggestion Jenna! Keep those entries coming!
To learn more about how you can win two free seats to the Greeley Medical Staff Institute Symposium, click here.
FSMB welcomes new president and CEO
The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) announced yesterday that Humayun J. Chaudhry, D.O., M.S., FACP, FACOI, will lead the organization as its new president and CEO beginning in October.
He currently serves as Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer of the Suffolk County, N.Y., Department of Health Services, a Clinical Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, and an Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine of New York Institute of Technology (NYIT).
Board certification conversation still going!
The conversation regarding the relationship between board certification and physician competence continues! I’ve received several more e-mails, so I thought I’d share what your colleagues have to say.
“I believe that expiration of board certification occurs for various reasons not related to competency. It seems ludicrous to assume that a practitioner’s competence diminishes if he/she does not recertify. The measure of true competence should not be confined to board certification, and in fact that runs contrary to CMS conditions of participation.”
~Jill Jourden, CPMSM
Medical Staff Administration
Saint Francis Memorial Hospital
“My hospital established a board certification requirement in 2002. It requires all physicians to obtain board certification within five years of completing their residency or fellowship. All members, with few exceptions, are required to maintain board certification. When the bylaws amendment was created, a grandfather clause was included for those physicians who did not qualify for board certification. Most of those physicians have retired from staff by now. We’ve had a few physicians challenge the bylaws. One physician went as far of the state supreme court. We’ve had physicians who left the medical staff because they failed their board exams, allowed their certifications to lapse, or chose not to recertify at the end of their careers. All of these issues have been dealt with thoughtfully by the medical executive committee. At times, enforcement of the bylaws can be difficult, but consistency is the key.”
~Anonymous
“Board certification, within itself, does not prove physician competence. It is simply one measure, one tool if you will, to determine whether or not a physician is qualified to perform in a particular specialty. Other considerations such as training, experience, teaching, and continuing medical education should also be considered when evaluating a physician’s competence. Our medical group believes that board certification provides a unique and widely accepted measurable objective upon which to base decisions. We have mirrored our internal policy to that of surrounding hospital and insurance carrier partners.“
~Sheri Wahl
Manager, provider credentialing and enrollment
UT Medical Group, Inc.
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Keep the comments coming in!
Contest entry: Skip the back and forth at reappointment
Donnie E. Sauls, MBA, CPMSM, manager of medical staff services at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, NY, submitted a great suggestion for eliminating MSPs’ and physicians’ paperwork frustrations at reappointment time. Sauls schedules one-on-one meetings with physicians to assist them in completing the electronic reapplication form. All incorrect or incomplete information is manually updated on the electronic form as the physician looks on. Sauls prints out the form for the physician to sign and makes copies for him or her to put in a take-home package for the physician.
“Our physicians are very pleased with the process because it takes around eight minutes to do, and there is no back-and-forth requests for incomplete reappointment applications. They also get to have a copy of their reappointment application with no out-of-pocket expenses,” Sauls writes.
Thanks for the great tip, Donnie! Keep ‘em coming!
Join the conversation: Board certification and competency
Little did I know how many responses I would get when I included a news bite in this week’s issue of Medical Staff Leader Connection regarding a new study that explores the relationship between board certification and privileging!
A study in the Archives of Surgery suggests that hospitals do not consistently require physicians to be board certified to receive privileges. Out of the 109 hospitals that were surveyed, only 5% required surgeons to be board certified when they received initial privileges. In addition, 82% of all hospitals surveyed allowed surgeons ad non-surgical subspecialists to retain privileges after their board certification expired.
Here are some of the comments you had to share: