Many physician practices consider staff performance evaluations to be a burdensome annual task. As a result, they give everyone the same salary increase as an easy solution. However, this is a disservice to their staff members, says Dorothy R. Sweeney, a private medical management consultant in Glenside, PA. "It's important that the staff knows where they are [with their performance] and the manager needs to stay on top of this," Sweeney says.

When an employee decides to leave your practice, do not assume that he or she is no longer valuable to you. Whether the loss is for voluntary or involuntary reasons, you may have questions about the employee's experience while at your practice. The best way to receive honest feedback from the employee and provide insight to your practice, staff, and management is to carefully plan an exit interview. By asking the right questions and noting the appropriate information, you can determine the key reasons why the employee is leaving. Most importantly, the responses may help you learn how to prevent a similar loss from happening.

E/M codes are among the major categories of codes that are frequently examined by third-party insurance auditors. Medicare auditors recently have seen many cases in which documentation guidelines are not followed adequately to support a consultation code. The key reason the documentation is scrutinized is because the reimbursements for consultations are higher than the reimbursement levels for office visits of similar documentation levels. In most instances, if the guidelines were not accurately followed, the consultation was either downcoded or denied. In either case, money is taken back from the practice or the physician. To ensure that the documentation matches the coding, consider the following guidelines.

Personnel issues can be one of the most difficult aspects of practice management. And according to the experts PPS consulted, there are several common mistakes that that can make HR even more challenging. They identified 13 common problems and offered insight on how to avoid or remedy them. 1. Hiring for experience, not fit. Practices often hire individuals who are a bad fit in terms of personality and temperament, and it most frequently happens in the front office, says Elizabeth W. Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, CPC, principal of Woodcock & Associates in Atlanta.

Some veteran doctors take offense at the high value younger physicians place on work-life balance, flexibility, and limited leadership commitment, saying it's disloyal and signifies a poor work ethic. However, there are younger physicians who say they've developed some of these views after witnessing older doctors' struggles in the field, and they don't want to go down the same road.