Back
2008 Brought New Psych Resources
Projects at UAMS, State Hospital and Around Ark. Enhance Mental HealthcareFor once, the past year has brought great improvements for the Arkansas mental health community. Although there is still a profound need for more psychiatric services and providers to serve the state's population, a spate of new facilities and resources in the state indicate that Arkansas is on the right track to breaching the gap in mental healthcare.
JENNIFER BOULDEN |
Arkansas Medicaid Rolls Out e-prescription Plan
Electronic prescribing has been shown to reduce medication errors, improve patient safety and outcomes, and save providers time and money.
Arkansas Medicaid officials and consultants hope the agency's new e-prescribing program will accomplish all those things, too. But the program, which rolls out on Dec. 15, will start small by trying to convince primary care physicians, especially those that generate high volumes of prescriptions, to adopt the technology.
TED GRIGGS - 1 opinion posted |
Physician Questions Medical Board's Blacklisting School
Dr. Gail Brown, a second-year resident family practitioner in Montgomery, Ala., spent most of her life in Arkansas and wants to return home to practice. She wants to bring her husband, Thomas Rose, also a second-year resident family practitioner, with her.
But following California's lead, Arkansas does not recognize their medical school, the Medical University of America on the West Indies island of Nevis, and so while both can continue to practice in Alabama and in other states, they can't practice here.
STEVE BRAWNER - 4 opinions posted |
Medical Missions to Repeat Locations Reap Rewards
When orthopedic surgeon Lowry Barnes and his nurse of 14 years, Marty Bushmaier, returned to Lima, Peru a few months ago, several locals were so excited to see them, they danced in the hospital's hallways.
That's because they were showing off their newly functional hips, replaced the previous year by Barnes, Bushmaier and a team of other healthcare providers through Operation Walk, an orthopedic-specific medical mission founded twelve years ago in Los Angeles, California.
JENNIFER BOULDEN |
Mental Health Parity Becomes a Reality
Although all the attention was focused on the financial ramifications of October's Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (HR 1424), mental health providers across the country rejoiced that patients were receiving a bailout of their own in terms of breaking down barriers to much-needed care.
CINDY SANDERS |
Tying Quality and Cost Measures to Reimbursement
When the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) convened its 2008 annual conference in the sunny city of San Diego in October, several sessions covered a subject that didn’t make for sunny dispositions – moves by government and private payers toward pay for performance. Agreed upon by many presenters was the fact that measuring physicians on quality and cost is a precursor of P4P, thus the accuracy of that data will eventually be critical to physicians’ bottom lines.
SHARON H. FITZGERALD |
Costly Compliance
New Rule Proposed by HHS Would Create Financial Burden for Healthcare ProvidersWhen the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) proposed a controversial new rule last August that would require all physician practices and clinical laboratories to use a new coding set as the standard code set for coding diagnoses on all HIPAA standard transactions, the news did not go over well with healthcare providers.
LYNNE JETER |
Larry Nguyen, MD
Larry Nguyen's life today—being an orthopedic surgeon, playing tennis, cycling and raising his family in Little Rock—is quite a bit different than it might have been, had his family not escaped from Communist Vietnam when he was four years old. "My parents had contacts in the government, so they bribed a fishing boat captain to escape, and were able to get passes to go to Canada," Nguyen explained. "We lived on that boat for a month."
JENNIFER BOULDEN |
|
|
| Google Ad Blocks |
|
| Add our RSS Feed |
|
| |
|
