FAP REGULATIONS

No doubt a large focus of your current work is the Community Health Needs Assessment and Implementation Strategy. But another key initiative for hospital compliance is financial assistance. Community benefit professionals should be conversant in the Financial Assistance Policy (FAP) regulations and involved in the review and distribution of the policies and procedures.

The time is now to connect with your legal, finance and risk management departments to confirm that the FAPs are being developed or updated to meet the federal requirements issued by the IRS. The requirement deadline to have your new FAP resources in place is 2016.

Resources To Help You

• December 31, 2014, the IRS issued the final rules that provide guidance on Financial Assistance Policies to nonprofit hospitals. The rules can be found in the Federal Register.
• Community Catalyst has excellent, easy-to-read resources: FAP checklist and issue brief.
• Review the webinar by Mark Rukavina on Connecting Mission to Margin. He outlines the FAP requirements.
• Check out the Community Benefit Connect Finance section for more helpful resources.
• Personal Coaching Community Benefit Coaching

IT’S REQUIRED

The IRS regulations for Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNA) require hospitals to post their CHNAs on the website in an easily accessible way. Community comments must be requested on your CHNA and Implementation Strategy. This is easy to accomplish by providing a link on your website to the CHNA and Implementation Strategy and include a request for comments. Here is an example of some wording you could use:
“Your feedback is important to us. Please comment on our CHNA and Implementation Strategy by emailing communitybenefit@xyzhospital.org”.

For your CHNA and Implementation Strategy to be considered complete, they must be approved by the hospital governing board AND posted on the website. The documents are not considered to be completed until they are posted on the website.
For the CHNA that is currently or soon-to-be underway, you are required to include the public comments from the previously posted CHNA. If you have not received any comments, you must still acknowledge your process for obtaining comments (i.e. posted on the website and comments requested) and note that no comments have been received.
Remember, the hospital must keep at least two rotations of CHNAs posted. So when the hospital’s next CHNA is completed, the new CHNA and previous CHNA must both be posted.

EVALUATE IMPACT

A necessary component of your community benefit program is to evaluate the impact of your community benefit initiatives, which are implemented to address significant health needs. Your hospital’s Implementation Strategy must include a plan to measure impact, and your upcoming CHNA must report on the impact of your actions. Community Benefit Connect has a number of resources to help you monitor and report impact. Visit the Community Benefit Connect website page on Process/Evaluate.

LIVE Q & A: CROSS the T’s and DOT the I’s – Details You Need to Know for the CHNA and Implementation Strategy

January 8, 2016 9am PT / 12pm ET
Duration 30 minutes
Presented by: Melissa Biel, RN, DPA
Co-Founder Community Benefit Connect

Join community benefit colleagues for a question-and-answer session on the required elements of Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNA) and Implementation Strategies that you may not know.

This session will discuss a number of issues, including: posting reports and soliciting public comment, evaluating impact, engaging the public in prioritizing health needs, reviewing the components of the Implementation Strategy, and other topics.

This LIVE question-and-answer session is designed as a participatory event to answer your questions. You are invited to submit questions in advance of the live event by emailing them to Melissa Beil. Questions will also be taken live during the session.

WHERE TO GO FOR HELP – COMMUNITY BENEFIT COACHING

Community Benefit Connect experts are available for coaching sessions and consulting. Community Benefit Connect helps when:

• You have questions about community benefit
• You need advice to adopt new practices, or
• You would benefit from validation of your current practices. We provide national experts to address your community benefit needs.

Our areas of expertise include:

• Community Health Needs Assessments and Implementation Strategies
• Measuring impact of community programs
• Healthy communities evaluation and program development
• Financial assistance policies and procedures
• Community benefit planning and reporting
• Program evaluation
• Staff training
• Executive leadership and Board development

For each engagement, we will connect you with knowledgeable and proven professionals.

WEBINARS

Join us as we explore information pertinent to community benefit practice and community health improvements. All webinars are saved in the archives where you can access them anytime!

Community Benefit and Finance Working Together – Sandra J Wolfskill, FHFMA Director, Healthcare Finance Policy, Revenue Cycle MAP, Healthcare Financial Management Association and Mark Rukavina, Principal of Community Health Advisors, LLC

Community Benefit Strategies and Medical-Legal Partnership: Leveraging Community Legal Resources to Impact Population Health – Ellen Lawton, JD and Woody Thorne

Telling the Community Health Story with Maps and Data – Angelica Baltazar, MSW, Health and Human Services Industry Specialist, Esri and Dora Barilla, DrPH, MPH, CHES, HC2 Strategies andEste Geraghty, MD, MPH, MS, Chief Medical Officer and Health Solutions Director, Esri

Data and Scientific Resources to support Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNA) and the Community Health Improvement (CHI) Process – Vickie Boothe, MPH

Connecting Mission and Margin through Hospital Community Benefit – IRS and Treasury Regulations in an Era of Heightened Transparency – Mark Rukavina

FEATURED WEBSITES

Drugwatch.com
This organization aims to educate the public about prescription/ OTC drugs, medical devices, and numerous other health issues affecting consumers. Some helpful resources include: Student Substance Abuse (Check out the infographic) and Drug Abuse in America.

Mesothelioma Guide
A new site reaching out to provide up-to-date support to mesothelioma patients and family members. Mesothelioma is a rare cancer, only affecting 2-3,000 patients each year. Although this number may be small relative to other cancerous diseases, it is almost always 100% fatal. Any individual or family that is diagnosed with or knows someone with cancer deserves to have the best information and support available. Our goal at Mesothelioma Guide is to increase mesothelioma awareness.

ChangeLab Solutions has released a comprehensive toolkit called Marketing Matters: A White Paper on Strategies to Reduce Unhealthy Food and Beverage Marketing to Young Children. The tooklit highlights strategies for local communities to reduce the marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children.

Multiple Chronic Conditions Education and Training
From the US Department of Health and Human Services is a new set of training materials for a wide variety of educators and healthcare professionals across the educational continuum focused on improving the care for populations with multiple chronic conditions.

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