I have recently noticed several pieces of news that I thought would be of interest to providers of behavioral health services and others. 1. The National Council Public Policy Update of April 8, 2010 pointed out an important change in timely filing requirements for Medicare claims: Requirements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act makes (sic) [...]
On January 29, 2010, the federal departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and Treasury released their ”guidance” on the Wellstone-Dominici Mental Health Parity Act. The National Council discussed some of the contents of the Interim Final Rule (IFR) in their February 4 Public Policy Update. The IFR goes into effect April 5, 2010 and applies to policies [...]
I sat down Monday morning to write this week’s blog post. I was intent upon writing about American Psychological Association’s (APA) recent report on climate change and what the psychology community can do about it. I had previously glanced at the executive summary of the report and was excited to learn what the entire report recommended. Unfortunately, [...]
Standard advice for securing computer systems is to require users to change passwords frequently. Something about this recommendation has always bothered me, but I never really thought it through. A current blog posting at Healthcare Informatics by Dale Sanders really hits the nail on the head. He points out that these change-passwords-frequently policies actually undercut password security [...]
Back in August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) posted a proposed rule requiring the implementation of the portion of HIPAA that mandates use of the ICD-10 by October 2011. The International Classification of Diseases-10 was endorsed by the 43rd World Health Assembly in 1990 and was implemented by many World Health [...]
