Healthcare

Hiring is tough. Under normal circumstances, it’s challenging to staff your facility with reliable and high-quality caregivers. Not only are executive and financial leaders managing significant labor shortages, they may also find themselves wading through a labor pool that still hasn’t settled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Adding to this complexity, the 2021 changes to Stark and Anti-Kickback laws make it difficult to balance the demands of physician salary requirements, the federal government, and your own facility’s budget.

Are you in need of a CFO or other financial director for your rural health system? Senior executives may not move on every day. But when they do leave, they're not easy to replace. Whether it's from within your organization or on the employment market, the best candidates rarely knock on your office door. They need to be found.

Let's hear it for clarity! Thanks to the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) revision of the Physician Referral Law (aka Stark law) in November 2020, we now have more explicit guidance for the key definitions. And for physician compensation experts, it's about time.

A final rule updating the physician fee schedule (PFS) rates was issued by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on December 1, 2020. The Final Rule finalizes many of the changes that were included in the Proposed Rule. Among other updates, the new regulation decreases the 2020 conversion factor of $36.09 to $32.41 and increases work relative value units for evaluation and management codes effective January 1, 2020. The significant decrease in the conversion factor is due to the mandate of budget neutrality.

On Friday, November 20, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published the long-awaited final rules revising regulations related to the Physician Self-Referral Law (known commonly as the Stark Law), the Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS), and the Civil Monetary Penalty Law (CMP). The revised regulatory framework for these two laws is intended to reduce barriers to care coordination and promote alternative payment models that focus on increasing value and delivering care in a more efficient and coordinated way.  

Change is a defining characteristic of healthcare. From technology to regulation to reimbursement, every aspect of the industry is in a constant state of evolution.

However, few things have changed healthcare as quickly and radically as the COVID-19 pandemic. Within the space of a few months, the landscape has been fundamentally reshaped. The long-term implications are still unknown, particularly in the area of physician practice acquisition.

Hundreds of physician practice acquisitions and healthcare-related transactions are in process at any given time. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the accompanying shutdown threw many such transactions into a state of uncertainty.

Recently, we spoke to Bob Homchick about today’s acquisition environment. A partner with Seattle-based Davis Wright Tremaine, Bob has played a leadership role in the American Health Law Association for many years. During our conversation, we identified six fundamental ways that COVID-19 will impact healthcare transactions currently underway, as well as those that may commence after the state of emergency ceases.

UPDATED August 11, 2020

Update: On June 25, 2020, the FCC’s COVID-19 Telehealth Program stopped accepting new applications.

COVID-19 continues to push the federal government to eliminate barriers to full-scale adoption of telehealth services.     

Following a March 17, 2020 announcement that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) would relax telehealth restrictions on Medicare and make telehealth available for a broader number of patients, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the COVID-19 Telehealth Program. 

UPDATED April 8, 2020

On March 29, CMS issued blanket waivers of the Physician Self-Referral Law (commonly known as the “Stark Law”) to cover financial relationships and referrals related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.  

UPDATED April 7, 2020: There have been updates to the proposed rule which can be found here. 

Telehealth services have become even more critical in caring for patients as the COVID-19 pandemic quickly evolves. In order to temporarily remove barriers to practice telehealth, the Federal Government and many States are making sweeping changes in Telehealth Waiver provisions. 

Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, certain expenditures related to providing employee parking were deemed unrelated business taxable income and resulted in taxable income for nonprofit organizations. This provision was highly unpopular in the tax-exempt sector. It resulted in a tax burden for organizations that typically did not owe income taxes, and an increase in administrative burden, due to complicated and tedious calculations.

In recent years, the use of care management services to provide better patient outcomes has gained momentum. Contributing to this momentum is a desire to generate greater transparency around patient behaviors in Post-Acute Care settings. This setting was the first focus area for the creation of care management services.