You and your peers have much to gain from implementing electronic health record (EHR) systems, including up to $44,000 in per-provider federal incentive cash and fewer misplaced medical records, but buying an EHR could bring big bonuses in the form of federal tax write-offs, Part B News has learned.

Your peers continue to struggle with Medicare enrollment issues that include CMS’s revalidation process, the usage of locum tenens providers to fill in for your own and how to fill out enrollment forms for doctors who interpret tests electronically from anywhere they can use a laptop. These three topics attracted more questions than almost any other at a recent Medicare enrollment workshop hosted by DecisionHealth.

You have less than two months to make sure that each of your providers – including non-physicians with prescribing privileges – e-prescribes for at least 10 unique Medicare patients. Every provider who fails to meet this requirement will be penalized with a 1% pay cut in 2012. This requirement applies to many providers not well-positioned to e-prescribe, such as practices hoping to e-prescribe via electronic health record (EHRs) systems later this year.

Your state will have a harder time cutting your payments if CMS finalizes a proposed rule aimed at ensuring access to care for Medicaid patients. The proposed rule, published May 6 in the Federal Register, would require states to conduct comprehensive data analyses, based largely on provider and patient input, before making any payment changes to ensure that the modifications don’t prevent access to care.

You won’t get the full story on revenue losses just by looking at denial rates for the codes you bill. Some services aren’t denied often, but because they pay a lot or you bill them more often, they cause bigger cash losses than high-denial codes. This chart examines the most financially damaging codes for four specialties with very high Medicare utilization and patient populations, based on the latest available CMS claims data from 2009.

Download this month’s tool – the Primary Care Incentive Program Payment Calculator, created by Part B News – to help you determine whether your providers are eligible for PCIP money. If they are, the tool also helps you estimate how much incentive cash they can expect quarterly from Medicare.

We are a small rural doctor’s office and have patients coming to us for wound care management after surgeries taking place more than 100 miles away. These patients are being seen by our nursing staff and since they are not seeing the actual physician during these visits, we are not billing anything. The nurses do a nursing assessment, review of systems, medication and allergy review and the actual wound assessment, which includes wound measurements, tissue conditions and healing stage – a thorough wound assessment. We also do wound care education, along with medication review education. We would like to start billing these patients but are not sure how to do it appropriately. Any suggestions?