Miami Health & Health Care Law Blog

Back in July, our blog discussed how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released a controversial set of quality ratings for U.S. hospitals, awarding one to five stars based on 64 measures of quality. Overall, the state of Florida's performance in the ratings was largely mediocre, with five stars being awarded to only two hospitals.

Interestingly enough, the financial website WalletHub recently released the results of a study ranking the 50 states and the District of Columbia on their respective healthcare systems and, once again, the Sunshine State did not fare especially well.

While we tend to think of health care as being provided solely in places like hospitals, clinics and doctor's offices, the reality is that it is frequently provided in the comfort of people's own home. By way of example, consider the burgeoning field of telemedicine, which enables people to see a physician or nurse practitioner via the internet, and, of course, home health care providers.

For those unfamiliar with home health providers, they are the individuals or entities that provide both medical-related services in the residences of everyone from the elderly and the disabled to those who are gravely ill and those who are recovering from hospitals stays.

Earlier this week, the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing to discuss the Stark Law, an endeavor that saw medical professionals, health law attorneys and business executives from across the U.S. voice similar concerns that the law has become needlessly complex and wholly unnecessary.

For those unfamiliar with the Stark Law, it essentially prohibits physicians from referring patients to providers with whom they have existing financial connections and/or facilities where they have ownership interests (i.e., imaging centers and labs). Its original purpose was to remove financial considerations from the medical decision-making process, and, by extension, curb Medicaid and Medicare overutilization.    

Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and the unprecedented growth of wireless internet access over the last decade, most of us now have instant access to our social media accounts and a treasure trove of information on virtually any topic.

This wealth of information, of course, includes online reviews of virtually every service provider you can imagine from hotels and restaurants to contractors and cab companies. Indeed, the explosion of online reviews has now carried over to the medical profession, such that with just a few keystrokes or swipes of the finger, a person can access patient reviews of everyone from doctors to dentists.