You can’t afford to sit on claims that were denied due to common mistakes such as forgotten modifiers and wrong diagnosis codes. The best practices are aggressive, turning these around the same day by fixing them over the phone or by quickly firing off a redetermination request. "Fix it right away or appeal right away, so you don’t have a situation where you could be making the same mistake on future claims,” urges Maxine Lewis, CPC, president of Medical Coding & Reimbursement Management in Cincinnati.

Your practice could be missing out on valuable revenue if it’s in-network with the wrong payers. Choosing to add or drop payers will balance your patient load and is essential to keeping your practice busy and your capitalizing profits, experts say.

Here are key signs to watch out for and tips on what to do when evaluating your practice’s current payer networks’ sufficiency:

This chart shows median physician compensation for 20 major specialties, comparing 2008 to 2011 survey data from the American Medical Group Association (AMGA). The average compensation boost across all 20 specialties was $29,888 and the percentage gain was about 9.6% over the three-year period.

Is there a time limit for CMS to recoup overpayments?

Download this month's tool -- a labeled template of a successful appeals letter -- to help you quickly turn around denied claims, especially denials that were caused by simple mistakes. You can use the format of this appeal letter to develop your own variation that accounts for your specific specialty, denials and patient cases.

Your non-physician practitioners (NPPs) aren’t eligible to collect the $18,000 first-round electronic health record (EHR) incentive payment, but they can help your physicians get that cash by boosting workflow and assisting with meaningful use measures.

“NPPs help with many of the list-based measures, they help with managing patients and they help fill the gap … when physicians are learning EHR and getting used to that workflow,” says Christopher Tashjian, MD, a family practitioner in Ellsworth, Wis., who has already earned the federal incentive money.

Using your physician assistants (PA) to assist in surgeries can free up your doctor’s time, but can also be a big reason for claims denials with surgical modifiers. Medicare claims data showed that PAs had a 16% denial rate for using both modifier 78 (return to or for related procedure, post op, same physician) and modifier AS (assistant in surgery) in 2009 and experts don’t believe that is a coincidence.