Editor's note: This is the first in a two-part series on how publishing a newsletter can benefit your practice. Next month, we'll look at how sending a newsletter to patients can help market your practice. Communicating with staffers and physicians about new goals and initiatives at a large practice can be a frustrating task for a practice administrator or office manager. When regular meetings, e-mails, and faceto-face conversations aren't doing the job, an internal newsletter can be the perfect tool to keep everyone in your practice on the same page.

If CMS' changes to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) pass through Congress in the fall, payments for certain E/M series will get a boost, but others will drop. "It's time to increase Medicare's payment rates for physicians to spend time with their patients," said CMS Administrator Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, in a statement. This change doesn't mean that all physicians will see improvements to their bottom lines.

Interviewing and hiring personnel from placing the ad to sifting through resumes and sitting through dozens of interviews-is truly the hardest task for any manager, The hiring process is arduous, time-consuming, and often disappointing. Hiring is a necessary evil, but it doesn't have to leave you feeling burned. To get atop this process, follow these six steps

Know legal protections, ethical obligations of providing Good Samaritan emergency care Liam Yore,1 a physician from north of Seattle, was on a flight to Greece when a flight attendant asked over the airplane's intercom system whether there was a doctor on board. Yore thought of several reasons to ignore the call. First, the lack of equipment and resources to which he was accustomed in the emergency room (ER) severely limited his ability to treat patients. "There's very little as an ER doc that I'm actually capable of doing out of the hospital setting. I can do better [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] than most people, but that's about it," he says.