Insights from Ludi

Today hospitals still face many regulatory and compliance risks. However, we aren’t out of luck quite yet, because there are several ways hospitals can reduce these types risks. Here, we highlight six ways to avoid costly fines and settlements specifically related to physician compensation practices.

At Ludi, our sole focus is physician administrative contracts. These are the legal vehicles that contain a variety of administrative services that physicians provide to hospitals that are not clinical. These services include medical directorships, on-call, co-management agreements, and physician committee work to name a few. We work with various sizes of health systems and have noticed several patterns, regardless of size, that all hospital administrative teams fall into when automating their manual processes that currently support their payment processes and executive of their physician contracts.

In September, 2015, the Department of Justice (DOJ) published the Yates Memo, a document outlining the accountability of individuals for corporate wrongdoing. This means that any individuals responsible (whether knowingly or unknowingly) for the wrongdoing are now being involved in the case where all facts of the alleged crime must be disclosed to the DOJ. Hospital executives fall into this area of accountability and since the release of the Yates Memo we are now seeing the punishment of individuals.

The four top areas for regulatory risk for hospitals include: Patient privacy, coding, quality, and physician agreements. Physician agreements tend to have the most opportunity for points of failure due to the process, structure, and people involved in making sure agreements are appropriately written and managed over time.

Read through the following 5 tips and consider them a guideline to lower your risk related to physician agreements: