A failure in the sterilization process at a Birmingham pharmacy appears to have caused the infection that sickened 19 people in Alabama hospitals, nine of whom died, the state health department said. Investigators found exact matches of the bacteria on a water faucet, a container and a device used to mix intravenous nutritious supplements at Meds IV, State Health Officer Don Williamson said. But there are still questions about how the contamination occurred. The Alabama Department of Public Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been investigating the outbreak of Serratia marcescens in five hospitals around Birmingham and one in Prattville. It is linked to bags of TPN, total parenteral nutrition -- a supplement given intravenously to patients too sick to eat -- mixed by Meds IV and sent to those hospitals in January, February and March. Williamson said that samples of the bacteria were taken from Meds IV's compounding room, grown out and run through a genetic fingerprinting process.
The attorney for former WellStar CEO Greg Simone, MD, said that certain health system executives have fabricated events and taken others out of context in an effort to smear Simone and divert attention from their own actions. On April 1, WellStar attorney Sharon Morgan of Elarbee, Thompson, Sapp & Wilson sent Simone a four-page letter detailing why WellStar's Board of Trustees fired him on Sept. 2. Simone's attorney, Ben Mathis, responded in a six-page letter dated Friday, warning her that she, as well as those who instigated the April 1 letter, have subjected themselves to a possible lawsuit. In his letter to Morgan, a copy of which was obtained by the Journal, Mathis accuses her of engaging in "a high-tech character assassination" against Simone and Bonnie Wilson, who was also fired last year from her position as executive vice president and general counsel for WellStar.
Wheaton Franciscan Medical Group in Racine, WI violated physicians? contracts in 2008 by retroactively changing doctors? pay halfway through the year, according to a decision filed this month in Racine County Circuit Court. The decision came almost two years after former Wheaton Franciscan-All Saints spine surgeon Branko Prpa, MD, filed a civil suit against All Saints? medical group for the 2008 pay change. Wheaton?s doctors including Prpa began 2008 working under a compensation model where they were paid based mostly on their specialty and prior year net service charges. But Wheaton switched in July 2008 to a compensation model that assigns a dollar amount to every type of office visit or procedure.
In one of the largest healthcare fraud cases in the Jackson, MS area, a federal jury convicted a Jackson physician late Friday of orchestrating a scheme that netted her $6.9 million in fraudulent Medicaid and Medicare claims. Dr. Cassandra Faye Thomas faces a maximum 125 years in prison after a jury of eight women and four men convicted her on all 10 counts after deliberating almost four hours Friday evening. The jury verdict left the 54-year-old Thomas and many of her family and friends in the courtroom sobbing. One family member called it a miscarriage of justice. But Assistant U.S. Attorney J. Scott Gilbert said in court that Thomas created a scheme by sending unlicensed and unqualified personnel into homes to give therapy sessions to patients. "The motive was pure greed," Gilbert said.
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) would suspend all rulemaking and enforcement activities in light of a government shutdown, a Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) official confirmed.
If Congress cannot agree on spending for the rest of the fiscal year by midnight Friday , there would be a federal shutdown on spending of nonessential government services.
In an e-mail to the OCR, the HIPAA privacy and security rule enforcer under HHS, HealthLeaders Media asked about a shutdown's impact on OCR operations.
In response, HHS wrote, "Agency operational plans are still being finalized, but our current understanding is that OCR's rulemaking and enforcement activities--including investigations--would be suspended in the event of a federal shutdown."
OCR is in the process of crafting rules per the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Those rules affect the HIPAA privacy and security rules. OCR also is formulating per HITECH a HIPAA audit plan for covered entities and business associates.
Final rules are expected on:
Breach notification
Enforcement
HIPAA HITECH (modifications to privacy and security rules)
OCR officials had said they expect to release the rules simultaneously. They had predicted they would be delivered in March.
OCR is also preparing a proposed rule on accounting of disclosures of electronic health records systems (EHRS). HITECH calls for OCR to expand the HIPAA accounting disclosures provision to add treatment, payment, and healthcare operations disclosures when they're through an EHR.
Two senators have introduced legislation to overturn a 1979 court injunction that bars the government from revealing what individual physicians earn from Medicare. That information is stored in the Medicare-claims database, widely considered one of the best tools for finding fraud and abuse in the $500 billion federal health-insurance program for the elderly and disabled. The Medicare Data Access for Transparency and Accountability Act, or DATA Act, was introduced Thursday by Sens. Ron Wyden (D., OR) and Charles Grassley (R., IA). They both serve on the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicare. The Wall Street Journal, together with the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, obtained from the government limited access to the database last year. Despite severe restrictions on using the data, the Journal was able to mine it and publish a series of articles exposing how doctors and other medical practitioners appear to be gaming Medicare to increase revenue.