In Case You Missed It -- Healthcare Daily Digest for Monday, 7 January

There’s a right way and a wrong way to deal with overpaying your employees. The wrong way can be best exemplified by this story that comes to us from “Across the Pond” as no one ever really says: “A hospital called in the bailiffs to claw back £1million from doctors and nurses it overpaid by mistake. (A little conversion help: £1million is equivalent to $Infinity in U.S. dollars because the dollar remains a little under the weather.)

The UK hospital system, Barts and London NHS Trust, has allegedly been overpaying many staff since 1999 — even after being informed by some that they were being overpayed. This over-paying situation, however, has sort of come to light for Barts and London NHS Trust with some kind of quickness and they realize that the need all that over-paid money back. Like, yesterday.

Hence the debt collectors.

A big factor motivating this Very Bad Situation: Barts and London NHS Trust are currently making job and budget cuts because of a budgetary shortfall no doubt exacerbated by its fiddle-dee-dee attitude with regards to money. Debt collectors, though, seems a little strong tea. “Barts and London said it pursued all overpayments but was testing a new system to prevent similar mistakes happening in future.”

According to the Mirror U.K., “Of the £1million accidentally paid out, £275,580 remains outstanding.”

Other headlines from around the web:

• If You Brought Your Headphones: Take a moment and listen to attorney Lisa Sotto talk about what businesses need to do as they prepare to comply with looming HIPAA modifications.

• Wyoming: The “Why Us?” State: “Wyoming leaders spent 2012 hoping federal health reform would just go away. This year, they’ll have to learn to live with it.

• Also, The Motley Fool is Still a Thing: Find out what TheMotleyFool.com thinks are the “3 Big Stories Health-Care Investors Should Be Watching This Week.

• Getting You to the Point Before This Article Does: This story running on the El Paso Inc. site shows how a homeless shelter, by switching to a sugar-free kitchen, is helping to decrease the number of emergency room visits. (It takes about 28 paragraphs before it gets you to the meat of the story.) “Sometimes small medical problems become big ones or residents bounce back to the city’s emergency rooms because they stop taking their medication or don’t get proper care after surgery.” There are steps to ameliorate this; the Salvation Army in El Paso is showing how. (Did we really need to know that the Salvation Army in El Paso is near the zoo?)

• Gentlepeople, Start Your Resumes: “According to reports recently released by the U.S. Department of Labor, and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the best national jobs for growth, advancement and salary increases in 2013 are in the fields of informational technology, engineering, health care, finance, construction, and management.

• Officials Delay Enforcement of Two HIPAA Operating Rules: Which doesn’t mean that the due date is different. “CMS said that its Jan. 1 compliance deadline for the operating rules remains intact, but it will not begin enforcing the rules until March 31.

• I Guess Their “Worst Doctors for Medical Advice” Plan Didn’t Turn Out So Well?: “Business Health Care Group enlists Best Doctors for medical advice.