Welcome to your daily briefing on healthcare developments in AB. Today we're covering 6 key stories including updates on alberta healthcare headlines, background & context. Let's dive in.
3 stories
Alberta's Interactive Health Data resource shares health data and statistics across topics such as demographics, mortality, and disease, presented in tables, dashboards, and maps.
For healthcare professionals in AB, this provides a practical source of local evidence to support planning, service readiness, and clinical decision-making.
CMS is requiring nursing homes, effective Jan. 26, to publicly report employee turnover rates and weekend staffing levels for direct care staff.
AB healthcare professionals in nursing and long-term care can use this as a transparency benchmark while addressing staffing and retention challenges.
Alberta’s health data resource describes how administrative health data can be requested for research, planning, and project use, and how to access online health data resources.
For AB healthcare professionals, centralized access to administrative health data supports data-informed care planning, research, and quality improvement across the province.
Reach healthcare professionals
3 stories
A vendor is a business associate if they create, receive, maintain, or transmit PHI on behalf of the covered entity. They are NOT a business associate just because they happen to be in a building with PHI or could conceivably access it. The functional test matters, not the proximity test.
Forcing BAA execution on vendors who do not meet the functional test creates contractual bloat and weakens the negotiating position with vendors who actually do. Failing to execute BAAs with true business associates exposes the covered entity to OCR enforcement.
Across most payors, the top-five denial reasons account for over 80% of prior-auth rejections: missing clinical documentation, wrong CPT/HCPCS code, service not in benefit plan, step-therapy not completed, and ordering provider not on the patient's plan. The same five repeat across plans because they are the easiest to deny on automation.
Practices that build a five-line pre-submission checklist around these reasons typically cut prior-auth denials by 40-60% within a quarter. The fix is process, not appeals capacity.
OSHA inspections of healthcare facilities most commonly find three violations: an Exposure Control Plan that has not been reviewed annually (date-stamped review required), engineering controls that have not been re-evaluated when new devices are introduced, and post-exposure protocols that do not match the actual reporting workflow.
Each citation carries per-violation penalties, and willful or repeat designations multiply them. Re-evaluation paperwork is the cheapest control to maintain.
Get AB healthcare intelligence delivered to your inbox every morning.
Subscribe FreeView all past issues
Feature your brand across the U.S., Canada, and select international markets and 10 industry verticals.
Become a National Partner