Nearly 75% of practices inadvertently misinterpret the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) guidelines for classifying an employee as exempt or nonexempt for overtime pay, according to estimates from Sandra McGraw, MBA, ESQ, CEO of The Health Care Group in Plymouth Meeting, PA. Failing to apply the guidelines correctly potentially puts your organization in jeopardy. A revamped FLSA issued by the Department of Labor (DOL) in August 2004 addressing circumstances under which employers may treat certain employees as exempt from overtime pay may have something to do with the confusion.

Understanding how length of time factors into the billing of an E/M code is a perpetual point of confusion in the coding world. Failing to code time correctly can result in third-party payers not reimbursing your practice appropriately-or sometimes not at all. So it's vital that your billers and coders (or whomever at your practice does the coding and billing) understand the three kinds of time that all third-party insurances should pay (see below for all seven E/M code elements).

Editor's note: In part two of this two-part look at contracts, we examine how to respond if a payer fails to follow through with its end of a contract. In part one, we reviewed clauses to watch for when negotiating your payer contracts. When a managed-care contract deviates from the terms outlined, you need to know how to proceed and prevent more problems, says Sherri C. Staat, CMPE, administrator for Orthopaedic Associates Medical Clinic in Visalia, CA, and a presenter for a contracts seminar during the 2006 MGMA Financial Management Society-Managed Care Assembly in San Diego. Staat; Physician Practice Consultant Michael Fleischman, FAAHC, of the Georgia-based Gates, Moore & Company; and Maria K. Todd, MHA, PhD, vice president of HealthPro Consulting, Inc., in Brooklyn, NY, offer the following tips to use when payers deviate from the contract terms

Physicians lead busy lives, and when not dedicating their time and energy to practicing medicine, they often rely on a hobby to unwind. For many physicians, this means something traditional (e.g., playing golf or a musical instrument), but a growing number of medical professionals are seeking a creative outlet as amateur publishers. How? They blog. Also known as Weblogs, blogs are online publications that allow anyone with Internet access to become an instant publisher. Content can range from personal thoughts-similar to a diary-to news and analysis or political rants.