You risk being censured for compromising patient care and your office could be flooded with phone calls, faxes, and unexpected patient visits when you don’ t perform the mandatory face-to-face encounter for home health care certifications, experts tell Part B News. “The face-to-face requirement is not something the home health agencies or doctors wanted,” says Ann Rambusch, a home health consultant in Round Rock, Texas.

You can now attest to having achieved meaningful use in 2011 and theoretically get up to $18,000 per provider under the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program – though very few practices are in a position to do so this early, experts say. To report that you met meaningful use and are thus eligible for incentive money, you must register all your providers with a CMS website called the EHR Incentive Program Registration & Attestation System.

You can use a new CMS online tool to see how close your providers are to meeting stage 1 meaningful use requirements, which would yield $18,000 per provider in federal bonus dollars under the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program.

This chart compares specialists’ E/M utilization and denial rates by code level, focusing on the most common (level 3) and the top two levels (4 and 5). NOTE: Primary care is the top biller of E/Ms and was thus not included to emphasize the specialty data. Level 3 E/Ms retain their claim to being the top level billed in terms of sheer volume, accounting for the largest slice of the utilization pie for seven of the 12 specialties analyzed. However, five specialties – cardiology, hematology/oncology, neurology, pulmonary disease and rheumatology – bill more level 4s than level 3s or level 5s.