CMS

Nursing home pay boost is approximately $1.2 billion in Medicare Part A payments to SNFAs in FY 2024

The proposed SNF pay increase for fiscal 2024 outpaces that proposed for hospice providers and inpatient rehabilitation facilities in recent days.

The agency declined to issue a staffing minimum as part of its annual payment rule proposal. instead saying it “remains committed” to doing so “later this spring.”

Skilled nursing remains the only healthcare sector yet to recover from its pandemic staffing losses. At the current pace of modest job growth, nursing homes would not return to pre-pandemic staffing levels until 2027, the American Health Care Association and the American Hospital Association warned CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure in an April 3 letter.

SKILLED NURSING

Nursing homes in ‘post-antibiotic’ era

Multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs), commonly referred to as superbugs, will be on the rise, with dire consequences for nursing homes, warn medical experts and government agencies. Unless the use of antimicrobial drugs is curbed and more closely monitored, infectious diseases – as seen during the Covid-19 pandemic – can spread quickly through nursing homes.

Antimicrobial drug overuse has been a concern for decades, with health officials issuing regular warnings. Antifungal drug-resistant infections increased 60% in 2020, CDC reported.

DEFENSE STRATEGIES

Shock verdicts: defense strategies to combat excessive verdicts and settlements

Stratton Horres and Karen Bashor of Wilson Elser recently presented a webinar entitled “Aftershocks:  How Shock Verdicts are Resulting in Outrageous Settlements.”  Verdicts and settlements are at unprecedented amounts.  Shock verdicts, those at or greater than $10 million or those not rationally related to actual damages, result in “aftershocks” of enormous settlements.  What is creating this shock verdict environment, and what tools can defense counsel use to combat the emboldened plaintiffs’ counsel?

The webinar presenters suggest a “collaborative litigation” approach with plaintiff counsel to resolve cases as early as practicable and avoid the time and expenses of a long adversarial process.

One key to an early resolution is the assessment and evaluation of the claim by the defense.  In a case involving healthcare, the basis for this is a review of the medical records.  To combat the Reptile Theory, the defense introduces alternative causation concepts.

A valuable tool for understanding the entire timeline of a patient’s clinical course is a Medical Chronology.  The defense can focus the chronology on specific issues that may have contributed to the plaintiff’s alleged injury.  This topical chronology extracts the most useful data from the full medical chronology, putting the most relevant information to the defense strategy in a concise document.

PERFORMANCE METRICS

Excelas, LLC March 2023 Performance Metrics

Excelas, LLC Performance Metrics as of March 31, 2023:
14,016 Records/Cases Reviewed
18,335,627 Pages Processed
376 Clients & Firms Supported
8,712 Hours of proprietary Zaxas software development
$1,045,492 investmenttmade in proprietary Zaxas software development

(Click on image to see which states are completed)

LATEST UPDATE

Excelas’ PREP Act Updates list summaries of relevant articles and selected court decisions, as well as additional recent court decisions, with hyperlinks for reference. We are continually updating cases as information becomes available. If you have insights to share, we welcome your contribution, with credit. The attached update is the most recent, including listings through early January 2023.