Author: Shira Hauschen

Shira is Managing Principal of Dorsey Health Strategies. Shira has advised clients across a wide array of industry segments on topics including compliance with federal and state laws, healthcare IT, Big Data, telemedicine and mobile health, lean transformations (process improvement), vendor management, and integrated delivery systems. As a licensed attorney and via the integrated approach taken by Dorsey’s Health Care Industry Group, Shira’s consulting advice is attuned to and aligned with clients’ legal landscape.

Accelerated and Advance Payments: Financial Relief for Medicare Participating Providers & Suppliers – A COVID-Prompted CMS Announcement

With the aim of enabling providers to focus attention and resources on fighting the COVID1-19 pandemic, CMS announced over the weekend that it intends to alleviate some of Medicare participating providers’ and suppliers’ financial burden by expanding its Medicare accelerated and advance payment (AAP) program to a broader group of Medicare Part A providers and...

CMS Announces Enforcement Discretion for Physician Payments Sunshine Act Reporting by Applicable Drug and Device Manufacturers

CMS announced today (with the details found here in its answers to Frequently Asked Questions) that in acknowledgment of the extreme circumstances posed by COVID-19, it will exercise enforcement discretion with respect to any Physician Payments Sunshine Act Open Payments reporting that is submitted after the March 31, 2020 deadline. CMS explained that while it...

COVID-19 and Cross-State Clinician Licensure: Federal and State Regulations, Revisited, and What To Do About Them

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased the number of patients and providers seeking to implement and use telehealth visits and other digital health solutions – and rapidly, at that.  The challenge of implementing digital health solutions, particularly telehealth, has historically been the patchwork setup of both federal and various state regulations that made it difficult...

Getting Ready for Open Payments

Today, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) released additional tips regarding submitting Open Payments data.[1] A quick refresher: Submitting data through CMS’s application, Open Payments, is the means to fulfill the Sunshine Act, a federal regulatory requirement that applicable manufacturers, group purchasing organizations (“GPOs”), and health care providers disclose: a) certain transfers of...

HIMMS, Chronic Care Management, and the Top 5 Overlooked Items

Harnessing existing digital health solutions to improve chronic care management was a prominent topic at HIMMS this year (amongst many others, including AI and cybersecurity, both of which we will cover in upcoming blog posts). While this is not a new topic, it was particularly “buzzy” this year due to the ever-increasing number of large...

State Scrutiny of Payments to Providers Growing in Response to Opioid Crisis

Several states have proposed and enacted new laws to address the opioid crisis, including laws that focus on reducing financial incentives that drug manufacturers can give to providers. Most recently, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie proposed a new regulation that would cap how much NJ prescribers can earn from drug companies at $10,000 per year. ...

Virtual Care Realities: Launching a Telehealth Initiative – Key Questions a Provider Should Address to Ensure Impact

Author’s note: Dorsey Health Strategies (DHS), a healthcare business consultancy founded by Dorsey & Whitney, offers a comprehensive array of business advisory and regulatory services to health industry clients; accordingly, DHS articles will address healthcare business challenges and regulatory considerations.  Since telehealth/virtual care/digital health is an area of expertise at Dorsey Health Strategies, this article...

EHR ROI: Meaningful Use and Leveraging Your Electronic Health Record

June 5, 2015 Shira Hauschen leads Dorsey Health Strategies LLC, a consulting firm serving the health industry affiliated with Dorsey & Whitney LLP. This article originally appeared in the Minnesota Hospital Association’s May 2015 issue of “Health Care Leader.” Meaningful Use (MU) is again at the forefront of many hospital leaders’ minds, as the Centers...