Business briefs: Apex hires a new engineer, Essentia earns a four-star rating, and a local financial advisor joins a sustainable investing council
Essentia Health St. Mary’s in Detroit Lakes received a four-star rating from Medicare s Care Compare program, Apex has hired another engineer to join its municipal group in Detroit Lakes, and a local financial advisor has been appointed to a council on sustainable investing.
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Essentia Health receives four-star rating from Medicare
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has released its 2021 ratings for hospitals as part of its Care Compare program.
Essentia Health-Fargo received the only four-star overall rating among Fargo hospitals. In addition, Essentia Health St. Mary’s-Detroit Lakes received a four-star rating.
What the Executive Order Requiring Federal Contractors to Pay a $15 Minimum Wage Will Mean
The upcoming rulemaking process should illuminate more.
It will take some time for the full scale and scope of President Biden’s recent executive order directing federal contractors to pay a $15 minimum wage for their workers starting next year to be seen.
Biden issued an executive order on April 27 that builds on one from President Obama in February 2014, which required federal contractors to pay their workers $10.10 per hour. Currently, the minimum wage for workers on federal contracts is $10.95 per hour and the tipped minimum wage is $7.65 per hour.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2022, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will enforce new Stark Law
1 requirements for physician compensation models in group practices. Group practices that rely on generating revenues through intra-group referrals of “Designated Health Services” (e.g., clinical laboratory services, therapy services, imaging services, outpatient prescription drugs, durable medical equipment, etc.), including for ancillary services billed under the In-Office Ancillary Services exception, should start planning now to ensure that their compensation plans – specifically, their productivity bonuses and profit-sharing plans – will remain in compliance with the Stark Law. The Stark Law is a strict liability statute, meaning even a technical misstep in a compensation plan can make the group’s Designated Health Services (DHS) non-billable under Medicare. Accordingly, it is important that group practices ensure continued compliance when the 2022 requirements bec
Office Visit: Safe visitation critical to care
David Holden
Since the onset of the pandemic, there have been many horrible after-effects. Most would agree, one of the worst was how residents of long-term care facilities suffered unmercifully without loved ones by their side.
COVID-19 was unforgiving toward our state’s most vulnerable population. Residents of long-term care facilities found themselves locked in with nothing but a pane of glass casting a window to the world, friends and family members.
On the front end of the pandemic, “no-visitor” policies were instituted to mitigate spread and save lives, but no one could forecast the damage it would expel on the mental health of everyone involved.
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Whistleblower Rewarded over $800,000 for Reporting to the Government a Kickback Scheme of a Software Developer of Electronic Health Records Tuesday, May 4, 2021
May 4, 2021. A False Claims Act whistleblower received a nearly $800,000 whistleblower reward for reporting a kickback scheme of a software developer of electronic health records (EHR). This software developer called CareCloud Health, Inc., based in Miami, Florida, agreed to pay the Department of Justice almost $4 million under the False Claims. It was liable under the False Claims Act for paying unlawful kickbacks to sell its electronic health record software products and fraudulently receiving incentive payments under the Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs designed to encourage the use of EHR software.