Image of male nurse pushing senior woman in a wheelchair in nursing facility

» The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently issued the latest version of the Minimum Data Set 3.0 Resident Assessment Instrument User’s Manual. The latest publication took effect Oct. 1. The MDS 3.0 will begin to track distinct calendar days of therapy and will include a co-treatment minutes item. In Section O0420, the manual update includes coding instructions and examples for the distinct calendar days of therapy requirement. The co-treatment item — found in Chapter 3, page O-17 — calls on providers to “enter the total number of minutes each discipline of therapy was administered” in co-treatment sessions over a seven-day period. 

» Operators can now use three new models of Notice of Privacy Practices documents to maintain Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliance, two government agencies have announced. A Notice of Privacy Practices describes how a provider ensures patient privacy and informs individuals of the privacy rights under HIPAA. All entities covered by HIPAA must make this type of notice available to any person who requests it, and must prominently post it to any website that provides information about services, according to the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights and the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

» Long-term care providers and other businesses might find Facebook an asset during a crisis, according to a new study. When the public reads a news story about a crisis and then sees Facebook posts from the affected institution, attitudes toward the facility are significantly more positive, University of Missouri-Columbia researchers found. Those surveyed also felt the crisis was less severe after viewing the posts, especially if they were written in a storytelling style. Seoyeon Hong, a doctoral candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism, created fictional universities to measure peoples’ attitudes toward crises. 

» People with dyslexia can read words appearing on e-readers with better comprehension than words on paper, according to a recent report in PLOS ONE. Investigators found the short lines on the  display of an e-reader, and not the device itself, leads to better comprehension.