Articles and Blogs

This week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) announced that the attestation deadline for the Medicare Electronic Health Record Incentive Program (“Meaningful Use Program”) is changed from February 29, 2016 to March 11, 2016. The new deadline applies to all eligible professionals, eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals participating in the Meaningful... READ MORE

On October 31, 2014, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) released the Work Plan for Fiscal Year 2015 (“Work Plan”). The Work Plan confirms OIG will continue to concentrate a great deal of their enforcement efforts on the security and vulnerabilities of protected health information (“PHI”) contained... READ MORE

Following recent news about the Heartbleed exploit, CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based security services company, challenged hackers to use Heartbleed to get private encryption keys that would unlock secure data. It reported multiple winners to its challenge. By obtaining the private key for an SSL/TLS certificate, an attacker could set up a fake website that passes... READ MORE

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) published important payment adjustment information this week for health care providers participating in the Medicare Electronic Health Records Incentive Program (“Incentive Program”). Eligible Professionals (“EPs”) participating in the Incentive Program may be subject to payment adjustments beginning January 1, 2015. CMS will determine the payment adjustment based on meaningful use data submitted prior... READ MORE

CMS has indicated that it intends to extend Stage 2 of meaningful use attestation under the Medicare/Medicaid Electronic Health Record (“EHR”) Incentive Program.  In a recent blog post, CMS states that the new or modified Stage 3 requirements for becoming a meaningful user of a certified EHR technology will not be effective until 2017... READ MORE

The FCC has opened the comment period on three Rural Health Care Program participants’ appeals of Universal Service Administrative Company decisions denying Healthcare Connect Fund (“HCF”) support for Illinois Rural HealthNet, Colorado Telehealth Network and Oregon Health Network (see our previous blog post on the subject). At issue is whether health care provider service locations that are urban,... READ MORE

The Oregon Health Network (“OHN”) has appealed to the FCC an adverse ruling by USAC regarding whether health care provider service locations that are urban, but are not licensed bed hospitals (or other eligible entities), will qualify for funding under the Healthcare Connect Fund (“HCF”). The determination of this issue will clarify whether the scope... READ MORE

Health information technology solutions that are remotely hosted or cloud based are becoming more common.  In these scenarios, a health care provider  is allowing its data – often times including protected health information (“PHI”) – to flow through or be stored in the vendor’s data center.  If PHI is involved, the parties should determine... READ MORE

Bureau of National Affairs is reporting that CMS and the OIG have submitted proposed regulations to extend the exception from the physician self-referral law and the safe harbor under the anti-kickback statute for EHR donations.  The report indicates that proposed regulations have been sumitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) for... READ MORE

On February 1, 2013, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued two publications recommending ways that key players in the mobile marketplace, such as operating system providers, application developers, advertising networks and analytics companies, can promote mobile privacy and security. READ MORE