Several hundred medical malpractice cases settled or adjudicated by
the Department of Health and Human Services between 1997 and 2004 were
not reported to a national repository of provider data, the HHS Office
of Inspector General said in report released Oct. 19.
All HHS
medical malpractice cases must be reported to the National
Practitioner Database (NPDB). However, the OIG found that 474 cases
that should have been in the database were not included.
Agencies for which medical malpractice cases were underreported to
the NPDB were the Health Resources and Services Administration (which
oversees the NPDB), the Indian Health Service, and the National
Institutes of Health. Cases were not included in the database for a
number of reason, the OIG said, including lost medical malpractice
files and incomplete information in medical malpractice files.
BNA’s Health Care Daily Report; Thursday, October 20, 2005
The final rule from the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule revises the
Stark definition of designated health services (DHS) to include
diagnostic and therapeutic nuclear medicine services. Since this
change will impact existing relationships, this portion of the rule
has a delayed effect date, i.e. January 1, 2007.
You can read CMS's discussion of this at
Fee
Schedule: Nuclear Medicine. (pg. 676)
