Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad introduced new legislation on Monday that would require the state’s long-term and residential care facilities to issue community-wide notifications when a registered sex offender becomes a resident.
Branstad, speaking at his weekly news conference, said the bill would force nursing homes and other facilities to inform staff, residents, residents’ families and the community when a registered sex offender is accepted into a facility.
U.S. healthcare spending experienced historically low rates of growth in 2009 and 2010, according to the annual report of national health expenditures published in the January issue of Health Affairs.
Christmas Eve I was having fevers, feeling chilled and shaking quite a bit. I knew there was a problem but did not know the cause. I talked to the nurses and suggested it might be a UTI or pneumonia, but with all the holiday business that got pushed to the side.
New standards for electronic funds transfers in healthcare, required by the Affordable Care Act, will reduce up to $4.5 billion off administrative costs for providers over the next 10 years, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The standards build upon regulations published earlier this year that set industry-wide standards for how health providers use electronic systems to determine a patient’s eligibility for health coverage and check on the status of a health claim.
A recent investigation into an outbreak of respiratory infection at a facility for young adults has spurred the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to remind long-term care facilities to have influenza management strategies.
The investigation, covered in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, found that while influenza vaccinations had occurred and antiviral drugs were used to treat ill residents, the drugs were not administered at a time optimal to the patients’ health.
If you operate a facility in Santa Monica, Calif., and happen to have a van for transporting residents, be on the lookout for some cranky new law enforcement practices. A recent article in the Santa Monica Daily Press tells of a Sunrise Senior Living van that has been ticketed eight times for parking on the street overnight—where it has been located every night for the last eight years without penalty.
Ronald E. Burrell, the former CEO of a North Carolina-based chain of assisted living facilities operated by Caremerica Inc., pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service out of millions in employment taxes, according to a U.S. Justice Department announcement Tuesday.
With Burrell at the helm, the Caremerica companies accrued more than $4.5 million in employment tax liabilities between 2003 and 2006, according to the Justice Department.
Your operations are probably not as safe as you think, as a client found out during a recent loss control visit. While conducting a physical hazard survey of a school building, a small, smoldering fire was discovered in the boiler room.
Most senior executives at hospitals, health systems, and insurers are still undecided about their organization's participation in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), commonly referred to as the Medicare ACO program, according to a poll conducted by the New York City-based audit, tax and advisory firm, which got an assist from the Washington D.C.-based healthcare legal firm Epstein Becker Green and the Addison, Texas consulting firm, JHD Group
At least 42 sex offenders are living within 21 Iowa care facilities for the elderly and disabled, according to a review of state records by the Des Moines Register.
Because the government doesn’t have enough data on unregulated residential care facilities, the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the CDC, engaged assisted living and personal care home providers to partake in a 2010 survey on everything from their bed capacities and census to how many residents receive Medicaid. The results, recently released here, provide a comprehensive look at the assisted living landscape.
These are the survey’s key findings as highlighted by the CDC:
Summary reports that follow discharged hospital patients to a nursing home are frequently delayed and sometimes incomplete, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
The researchers’ findings, recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, determined that discharge summaries regularly lack necessary information on diet, activity level, therapy and pending laboratory tests of nursing home patients after departure from the hospital.
