NCQA’s Updated Programs on Wellness and Behavioral Health

The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) just updated its Managed Behavioral Healthcare Organization (MBHO) Accreditation as well as its Wellness & Health Promotion (WHP) Accreditation. NCQA touts these updates as efforts to raise the bar on quality and efficient healthcare delivery, as well prepare for the eventual Accountable Care Act implementation. Click on these NCQA links to read more about the MBHO and WHP updates.

CMS Grants the Center for Improvement in Healthcare Quality (CIHQ) Deeming Authority

On Friday, July 26, 2013, CMS announced that it approved the Center for Improvement in Healthcare Quality (CIHQ) as a new deeming authority for acute-care hospitals.  CIHQ joins the ranks of DNV, HFAP, and TJC as the only national accrediting organizations with CMS-deeming authority. 

Established in 1999 as a healthcare consulting company for accreditation and regulatory support, CIHQ began to transition into an accrediting organization in 2011 and formally requested deeming authority from CMS in February 2013.  CIHQ uses CMS’s conditions of participation (CoPs) for its regulatory standards, in addition to a few of its own that cover “gaps in the COPs in the areas of patient safety and quality care.”

CIHQ is headquartered in Round Rock, Texas and focuses largely on acute care and critical- access hospitals.  Its deeming authority is effective July 26, 2013 through July 26, 2017. 

Learn more about CIHQ here.

Healthcare Daily: Physicians Gearing Up to Assume Leadership

Steve Jacob, July 24, 2013

"Most patients would be surprised by how little involvement their physicians have in running healthcare organizations.

The vast majority of U.S. hospitals are led by non-physicians, but it wasn’t always that way. A century ago, about one out of three hospitals were led by physicians, a number that has now dwindled to less than two percent.

According to a HealthLeaders survey, more than one-third of hospital and health system CEOs said they had no physicians on their senior leadership teams, which includes titles from senior vice president and higher. About half said one to 20 percent of their senior leadership team was composed of physicians."

Read the rest from Healthcare Daily.

amednews.com: Physicians find solutions in the face of disaster

Although such events are tragic, they move medicine forward by providing physicians critical lessons in emergency preparedness and response, medical experts say.

Christine S. Moyer, July 15, 2013

Doctors at Boston Children's Hospital had only a few minutes to prepare for the youngest victims of the Boston Marathon bombings before paramedics rushed the first patient into the emergency department.

One child was burned and covered in soot with a tourniquet compressing a mangled leg, said David P. Mooney, MD, MPH, a surgeon and director of the hospital's trauma center who was on duty that day.

Eight children arrived that afternoon. Many patients had leg injuries from shrapnel and from pellets and nails packed into the two bombs. The April 15 explosions injured more than 200 people and killed three.

Read the rest at amednews.com.

American College of Surgeons: Maintenance of Licensure Moving Forward

Jon H. Sutton, July 1, 2013

For many years, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) has been actively pursuing the development of a maintenance of licensure (MOL) program. Numerous committee and stakeholder meetings have centered on the concept and how the state medical boards can take it from the theoretical to the implementation level. Because licensure is critical to surgical practice, it is important that surgeons have some understanding of how changes in licensing are likely to affect them in the coming years, or at least what they may have to do to maintain licensure.

Many physicians may not yet know what MOL is or why it is necessary, as they may have heard or read only generalities about the topic. With that in mind, this article presents a more in-depth overview of MOL.

Read more on MOL from ACS's recent Bulletin.

CTel: AMA Welcomes Potential New Interstate Compact Licensure Policy

July 9, 2013

Many physicians are accustomed to the licensure process being somewhat of a headache—particularly when a provider is seeking a license to practice medicine in more than one state.  But all that seems possible to change soon.

As The Robert J. Waters Center for Telehealth and e-Health Law (CTeL) and others have previously reported, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) recently approved a policy that would investigate the details of a process to allow states to form interstate compacts. 

Read the more at ctel.org.

The Joint Commission to Post Prepublication Standards

Joint Commission prepublication standards will be posted [on the Joint Commission website] before they are officially published in the print manual format and online e-edition.

For more information, go to jointcommission.org.