John Reuter Shares Contract Guardian

As usual, John is always happy to share the Contract Guardian story.  If any of the readers did not have the opportunity to attend the conference...just give us a call.

R&K Presents at National Health Care Compliance Conference

1,600 Health Care Compliance Risk Officers from across the United States attended the conference.  R&K of course was sharing with the attendees our award winning Contract Guardian.

Contract Guardian and United Way

ContractGuardian.com will contribute ten dollars to the United Way’s National LIVE UNITED Campaign for each Contract & Commercial Management LinkedIn Member that attends the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA) Convention in Las Vegas from April 26th to the 29th, 2009 and visits us at booth #309 for 10 minutes. The attendees will see Contract Guardian which is our contract management hosted solution for contract managers in the healthcare industry. It is a powerful but easy to use solution designed for environments with many users that need read-only access to contracts with automatic e-mail notifications. Users can access documents from any computer with a browser. Attendees can use this opportunity to help our fellow Americans and learn something at the same time.

CHRISTUS Health Brings Transparency to Contract Management

Diana M. Holland, program manager, Strategy and Innovation, Business/Financial Strategies with CHRISTUS Health’s Information Management team, said "With Contract Guardian, the entire contract management process is more transparent, which allows us to build our operations on a process, rather than being dependent on individual people. Deployment is simple and only requires placing an icon on the desktops of the users. Nothing else needs to be installed or maintained."

Read the entire article published by LANSA.

Upgraded Generator for ContractGuardian's Facility

HARDWARE: Rippe & Kingston recently replaced their Generator at the ContractGuardian Data Center. The generator operates on natural gas to provide immediate backup and delivery of diesel fuel is not required . The final steps are being completed that include the secured enclosure and electrical hookups.

SOFTWARE: Contract Guardian includes a very easy to use Microsoft Excel Interface that is available from within the managed service. It allows an authorized user to access their contracts and manipulate in Excel. Stark Law compliance capabilities is also being included in the software.

Visit www.contractguardian.com for additional details.

Contract Guardian Enhancement for Stark Compliance

Several enhancements have been made to Contract Guardian's Other Party capabilities in Contract Maintenance. The Contract Managers can now search for related parties using a "free form" search and the application will search anywhere in the name field for the occurances entered regardless of case and position. Also, the Contract Manager can add a new related party record directly from the search screen. This enhancement will allow the Contract Manager to more fully utilize the application and assist with Stark compliance for conflict of interest. For additional information see our Stark Compliance page at www.contractguardian.com.

Stark Law and Contract Management

If you haven’t reviewed your physician contracts lately, it’s high time you did. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) are enforcing Stark and federal anti-kickback laws with renewed vigor, and hospitals need to be wary of any and all agreements made with physicians past, present, and future.

Any financial arrangement between a hospital and a physician or a family member triggers Stark. It doesn’t matter what the arrangement is with the physician or what the referral is because any financial agreement, whether it’s new or old, will trigger a Stark question when that physician makes a referral.

To learn more visit our Stark Law Compliance page at www.contractguardian.com.