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Finding the lawyer mentor to help you succeed in your career trajectory

“Forewarned is forearmed.” I adopted that as one of my guides. Nowhere is that more true than in the lawyer mentor selection process within AHLA.

I want to share some thoughts with you to make your selection more likely to lead to a meaningful mentor relationship to help you along your path in this broad, ever-changing field we have chosen.

I am passionate about many things, including mentoring and AHLA. While I mentor within my state and community, the focus there is often on facilitating connections for young lawyers looking for a job or a career change. Within AHLA, mentors additionally provide a safe place to discuss difficult issues – both legal and human relations – as well as inspiration and support to other lawyers. We have the opportunity to help other health lawyers along their career path, and to learn from those mentees.

Yet, while AHLA members may share similar passions and goals, that is not a strong basis for selection. Rather, there is a bit of magic to being selected. Obviously you need to be as transparent as possible about your goals, areas of interest (“Mentoring Topics”), and your member profile. As much information as you can share is important because you never know what it is that will draw a potential mentor to you. For example, in addition to substantive areas of health law of interest to me, I am interested in supporting young women balancing commitments to family, profession, and community. In reviewing recent mentee applications, I found that I connected with those who provided enough information so that I could connect with them., such as the young mother on the partnership track who still worked to contribute to her community and another who had moved from an in-house position to a private practice (as I did). Some of those who did not provide enough information in their profiles left me without a basis for connecting with them. I even suggested to some that they revise their profiles to tell their story and state their objectives more clearly.

In the spirit of wishing you the most satisfying, helpful, and inspiring mentor-mentee relationship, I will distill my thoughts down to the following messages of motivation:

Your story is interesting so tell enough of it – education, family, job path, current position. Let prospective mentors get to know you a bit.

Share your professional dreams, goals, objectives. Readers won’t know if they can be proper lawyer mentors without this information. Allow a prospective mentor to properly select you as his or her mentee based upon your objectives and common or complementary skill sets. You may also create a connection via disparate experiences and different skill sets, so pique the prospective mentor’s curiosity with sufficient information to determine if you two are a match.

If you want someone to provide feedback about a specific area, such as interfacing with the FBI or handling OIG investigations, or if you want your mentor to assist you in connecting within AHLA, be sure to mention those goals.

You must sell yourself truthfully, so don’t despair if it takes some time to connect with just the right mentor.

Finally, once connected to a Mentor, engage with that Mentor. AHLA recommends quarterly contact as a minimum. The responsibilities to create a meaningful relationship belong to both parties, as do the benefits of the relationship. Mentoring is a two-way street, and you will get out of it what you put into it, but it will be much less effective and satisfying – for both the mentor and mentee – if you fail to provide sufficient information upon which to base the relationship.

This Oklahoma healthcare law topic regarding mentoring was featured in the June 2018 issue of Connections, the official publication of the American Health Lawyers Association.

By Mary Holloway Richard

Mary H. Richard heads up the Health Care Practice Group at the law firm of Phillips Murrah, headquartered in Oklahoma City. Mary has a law degree from George Washington University and a master’s degree in public health administration from the Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. She began her career in ambulatory care, health services research, and health management consulting at the Texas Medical Center. She has practiced health law in private practice settings and as in-house counsel for the INTEGRIS Health system. While at INTEGRIS, she provided legal counsel on issues regarding behavioral health services, hospital operations, clinical research activities, and a variety of other topics in a number of facilities throughout the system. She is active in the AHLA and is a part of the AHLA Behavioral Task Force leadership. She served as subcommittee co-chair of the Providers/Clinicians subcommittee, Vice Chair of Publications, Vice Chair of Strategic Planning and Special Projects, and is currently Vice Chair of Membership. She continues to be active in the AHLA mentoring program by mentoring six young professionals and is an active mentor to lawyers in Oklahoma who are interested in health law. Mary is also a proud member if the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Her grandfather was one of the first lawyers in Indian Territory.

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Certificate of Need Laws Can Bridle Behavioral, Other Care

In this article, Oklahoma City healthcare attorney Mary Holloway Richard discusses Oklahoma’s Certificate of Need laws with the Daily Oklahoman newspaper.

Q: What are Certificate of Need (CON) laws and what is the status of CON in Oklahoma?

A: The history of CON laws is an interesting one. Federal law required CON for facilities that received federal funds to construct facilities. By 1978, unique CON statutes were passed in 36 states. Although the federal mandate was repealed in 1987, many states still have CON laws in place. The CON system was intended by Congress as one mechanism for controlling healthcare costs by controlling development. The idea was that unnecessary beds or services would drive up the costs and miss system efficiencies and economies of scale. Development was broadly defined to include activities ranging from new development, acquisitions, mergers, management agreements, leases, stock purchases and changes in ownership via foreclosure. The Oklahoma legislature repealed CON laws in all areas except for psychiatric and chemical dependency services and long-term care.

Q: What are the current requirements for developing long-term care and behavioral health services in Oklahoma under these statutory schemes?

A: For long-term care, the Oklahoma law provides for the development of long-term care services in a “ … planned orderly economical manner consistent with and appropriate to services needed by people in various (parts of Oklahoma) ….” Development must match or reflect the need demonstrated in the CON application as evaluated by the state Department of Health. The statutes also enumerate the powers of the Department of Health with regard to long-term care facilities and services. The law applies to long-term care facilities including nursing homes, specialized facilities such as long-term acute care and skilled nursing facilities and the nursing component of continuity of care and life care communities. For psychiatric and chemical dependency service facilities, the process is outlined in the statutes and includes application requirements, findings by the state Board of Health, providing bases for the board’s decision, the opportunity for appeal of the board’s decision and an explanation of potential penalties for failure to comply.

Q: Some writers and consultants in the healthcare industry contend that these laws no longer serve the purposes for which they were created by legislatures or fail to achieve the ostensible objectives. Is this fair criticism?

A: All segments of the healthcare industry are highly regulated. There is a good argument to be made that business decisions in the healthcare space are guided by reimbursement, the impact of effectiveness and outcome metrics, and classic business principles such as market share and that, while the original ideas supporting the CON effort may have been sound, the system now provides an additional hurdle and expenses in two areas of significant needs in our state — services to the elderly and others requiring long-term care and to those suffering from behavioral health diagnoses. More specifically, Oklahoma’s CON rules apply only to hospitals so that development for treatment facilities not considered “hospitals” by the Oklahoma Department of Health are not covered by the CON procedures and limitations. The result is that addiction treatment facilities providing services, including beds, only require the approval of the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, which does not have its own CON process and can be developed without hindrance.

Q: Is there interest among Oklahoma lawmakers to repeal the last vestiges of CON law in Oklahoma?

A: Although this issue has come up in the last several years, it has not been successful. No such legislation was proposed in the first regular session of this legislative term, which ended in May. In terms of the status of CON laws in the nation, as of 2016, 14 states had discontinued their certificate of need requirements and 34 continued with some remnant of the CON system.

Published: 10/12/17; by Paula Burkes
Original article: http://newsok.com/qa-with-mary-holloway-richard-certificate-of-need-laws-can-bridle-behavioral-other-care/article/5567643

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Feds paid $60 million in Medicare improper payments last year

Q: In 2016 the federal government paid out $60 million in “improper payments” to Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans. What are improper payments?

A: The prohibition against improper payments applies to Medicare and to the Medicare Advantage plans which stand in the place of Parts A and B but offer more choices to patients in the private insurance market. Most are HMOs, PPOs, and private fee-for-service plans. “Improper payments” refers to both underpayments and overpayments. The most common payment problems are traced to insufficient documentation of the care provided. Other problems are no documentation, failure to establish medical necessity and incorrect coding. Regulators tell us that the objective is to understand the ordering practitioner’s reasoning in evaluating and diagnosing a patient, in considering the alternative course of action and in selecting a specific treatment plan with the patient. Just as physicians have been trained to document robust informed consent, they are now being called upon to document their thought processes as a way of demonstrating the legitimacy of the treatment.

Q: What action can the federal government take once an improper payment has been identified by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)?

A: The CMS is part of the Department of Health and Human Services and it has an investigative arm known as the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which is the most robust of all federal agencies’ legal and investigative arms. The OIG can investigate a provider and refer the matter to the Department of Justice to bring a criminal or civil action against the provider that can result in repayments, penalties, and even incarceration. Such actions also ultimately can result in exclusion from federal payment programs and even loss of the provider’s clinical license to practice. A demand for repayment can be based on an extrapolation of a statistical sample of a provider’s claims submission and payment history.

Q: How can providers avoid making claims that result in improper payments? Are there certain kinds of providers who are at the greatest risk for coding errors?

A: In the face of this regulatory environment, providers would do well to engage in periodic preventive spot audits of their medical records documentation, coding and billing activity. Billing regulations are increasingly complex and require advanced training not only of the practitioner but also of his or her staff, billing company and supporting professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Continuing education, coding seminars and the like are the order of the day for persons with these responsibilities.

Q: What’s the potential impact of these billing errors on patients and on providers?

A: Improper documentation can be a result of mistakes, faulty documentation or fraud. Some documentation shortcomings can be traced back to the provider’s original training or education. Others relate to the electronic records formatting, which some experts argue fosters copying responses rather than creating medical record entries for each patient. Ideally, eliminating unnecessary claims benefits the health care system financially and so ultimately benefits the patient. However, in my experience, “false claims” often represent a failure on the business side of a medical practice or facility operations in a situation where quality services were actually performed. But once characterized as an overpayment, the amount paid by the Medicare contractor must be returned despite the fact that quality services were provided.

From NewsOK / by Paula Burkes
Published: September 29, 2017
Click to see full story – Feds paid $60 million in ‘improper’ Medicare payments last year

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NewsOK Q&A: FBI warns against doctors, dentists using ‘anonymous mode’ computer servers

From NewsOK / by Paula Burkes
Published: April 12, 2017
Click to see full story – FBI warns against doctors, dentists using ‘anonymous mode’ computer servers

Q: What attention has the FBI recently given to protect Protected Health Information (“PHI”) from cyber criminals?

A: Under a “Private Industry Notification” dated March 22, the FBI’s Cyber Division has provided guidance that’s applicable specifically to medical and dental providers and focuses on protection of sensitive, identifiable health information.

Q: What does the notice specifically recommend?

A: The notification recommends these health care providers request that their IT services personnel take steps to further secure the information from cyber threats by checking networks for File Transfer Protocol (“FTP”) servers running in anonymous mode. FTPs routinely are used to transport information between network hosts. This is the case, for example, when a covered entity such as a hospital or group practice transfers information to a business associate, such as a billing company or a third-party payer, for the purpose of submitting claims for services provided.

Q: What does “anonymous mode” mean and what threat does it represent?

A: “Anonymous mode” refers to the situation where an FTP server can be structured to permit users who are anonymous, doesn’t require a password to enter, and accepts common user names such as “anonymous” or “FTP.” The danger is that, in such circumstances, sensitive patient information stored on a server could be accessed with little or no security.

Q: Why does the FBI guidance focus specifically on health care?

A: Research conducted at the University of Michigan in 2015 resulted in a finding that more than one million FTP servers would allow such access. According to the FBI, some computer security researchers seek servers in anonymous mode as part of legitimate research, but others make such connections to facilitate nefarious activities such as launching cyber attacks, hacking, blackmailing, harassing and intimidating business owners. It’s the FBI’s purpose issuing this new guidance to both make health care business aware of the risks represented in their IT systems and to shore up weaknesses that pose cyber security risks. In addition to the precautions urged in the notice, the FBI has previously urged companies to buy and implement ransomware.

Q: Should additional actions be taken by medical and dental health care entities to provide additional protections against cyber crime?

A: The FBI encourages medical and dental health care entities to report suspicious or criminal activity to the local FBI field office (locate via www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field) or the FBI’s 24/7 Cyber Watch, CyWatch 855-292-3937 or CyWatch@ic.fbi.gov. Submitted reports must include available information regarding the date, time, location, type of activity, number of people and type of equipment used for the activity, the name and contact person for the entity submitting the report. Victim complaints can be filed with the internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov.

 

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Mary Holloway Richard sourced in article investigating hospital merger

Mary Holloway Richard, leader of the Firm’s Health Care Practice, was quoted in a Journal Record article by Sarah Terry-Cobo regarding an attempted merger by OU Medical System and how best to financially achieve that mission.

Read Richard’s comments from the article below:

OKLAHOMA CITY – When it comes to complicated relationships, sometimes it just takes the right partner. After a failed hospital merger was announced Monday, OU Medical System could still find its better half.

But making that match probably won’t be easy, said industry observers. Health care attorney Mary Holloway Richard said a potential partner needs the business expertise as well as the financial backing to purchase a large teaching hospital.

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Richard said teaching hospitals have historically had higher costs than non-academic hospitals.

A potential partner has to evaluate the economic feasibility, regardless of whether parties are considering an outright acquisition or a joint venture, she said.

“Will it fit in with your overall business model?” Richard said. “(A teaching hospital) is a complex system, so how you incorporate that complex system into an existing system requires mastery of both the business model and the financial feasibility, as well as recognition of the compliance issues at play.”

Read the full article at the Journal Record.

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