The University of Minnesota provides resources for Skilled Nursing Facilities and other organizations in the Long Term Care industry. NH Regs Plus serves as a one-stop location to examine and compare the content of state regulations related to nursing homes. It contains federal nursing home regulations and nursing home regulations for all states and the District of Columbia.

For more information, follow this link to their website: //www.hpm.umn.edu/nhregsplus/NH%20Regs%20by%20Topic/By%20Topic%20Main.html

Electronic Discharge Prescriptions
Compared to paper or fax prescriptions, e-prescribing improves medication safety, better management of medications costs, improved prescribing accuracy and efficiency, increase practice efficiency while improving health care quality and reducing costs. ADL Data Systems has the ability to send electronic discharge prescriptions to any retail pharmacy – no more need for paper prescriptions. Save time and money by sending all discharge prescriptions for a resident to any retail pharmacy.

ADL has incorporated the following into EMR:

Please contact ADL Data Systems for more information.

Email Phishing via XPS Files

Over the past month, some phishing attempts using xps files instead of the typical pdf or doc/docx formats have been captured by our filters. The xps file format is Microsoft’s alternative to pdf files. Windows machines with Vista or later operating systems natively support this extension with Windows xps file viewer. Actors have started taking advantage of this lesser-utilized format for their phishing campaigns.

Phishing Examples
AppRiver’s SecureTide email filtering has captured a wide range of these phishing messages. So far, they appear to be attributed to threat actors currently conducting Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks. Attacks originate from legitimate (compromised) senders with the similar techniques, tactics, and procedures.

Viewing the XPS File
Users should not open or view unsolicited attachments, even from a known sender without intense scrutiny and/or verification. Scammers do exploit the trust that known contacts share. Hopefully a user will never see one of these, however, this is what these attached files look like when opened in an isolated test environment.

This information was brought to you by AppRiver. For more information and examples of phishing, follow this link: //blog.appriver.com/2018/05/bec-attacks-evolve-to-phishing-via-xps-files-appriver

Spybot Anti-Beacon is a standalone tool which was designed to block and stop the various tracking (telemetry) issues present in Windows 10. It has since been modified to block similar tracking functionality in Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems.

Anti-Beacon is small, simple to use, and is provided free of charge. It was created to address the privacy concerns of users of Windows 10 who do not wish to have information about their PC usage sent to Microsoft. Simply clicking “Immunize” on the main screen of Anti-Beacon will immediately disable any known tracking features included by Microsoft in the operating system.

//www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

Skilled Nursing Facility: Proposed FY 2019 Payment and Policy Changes

CMS issued a proposed rule outlining proposed FY 2019 Medicare payment updates and proposed quality program changes for Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs).

Proposed Rule Details:

• Advancing My HealthEData: Request for Information from stakeholders
• Modernizing the SNF Prospective Payment System (PPS) Case-mix Classification System
• SNF Quality Reporting Program (QRP)
• SNF Value-Based Purchasing Program (VBP)
• Payment rate changes under SNF PPS

Use the following resources for more information:

• Proposed Rule: CMS will accept comments until June 26
• Press Release
• SNF PPS website
• SNF QRP website
• IMPACT Act of 2014 Data Standardization & Cross Setting Measures webpage
• SNF VBP Program website