Credentialing Resource Center Connection

In this week’s column, Anne Roberts, CPMSM, CPCS discusses modern security concerns for medical staffs.

During National Medical Staff Services Awareness Week, we asked MSPs to share their thoughts about the profession with us. Liz Jones, associate editor, interviewed Carole LaPine, MSA, CPMSM, CPCS, manager for physician services at Trinity Health in Novi, MI. As a veteran MSP, Carole had a lot to share.

Cheryl Schilke, RN, CPMSM, director of Synernet CVO in Portland, ME, writes contracts that explain the credentialing application her organization uses and which party (CVO, medical staff, or practitioner) is responsible for providing information for the individual sections.

Bypass heart surgeries used to be conducted using heart-lung machines, which carried with it a risk of stroke. Now, one in five bypass surgeries are conducted without the pump, leaving the patient’s heart beating on its own. This new technique isn’t as risk-free as previously thought, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In this week’s column, Emily Berry, associate editor, explores the link between the work of state licensing boards and medical staff offices.

If you haven’t already heard about it from the nurse practitioners (NP) at your organization, this week is National Nurse Practitioner (NP) Week. NPs are harnessing their spotlight to shine the light on the shortage of primary care providers in America—and how their workforce can help combat that shortage.

In last week’s column, Anne Roberts, CPMSM, CPCS wrote that her hospital was looking into encrypted flash drives. 

To clarify, the reason for the encrypted flash drives is so that no additional information can be added onto the drive. For example, if the hospital provides a practitioner with a flash drive containing policies and procedures, the hospital wants to ensure the practitioner can not use the flash drive to download confidential patient health information (PHI) and risk violating HIPAA regulations. Although the practitioner could potentially download documents containing PHI onto a personal flash drive not provided by the hospital, the hospital wants to take extra precautions and not provide a mechanism that would allow for this potential HIPAA violation.