The pros and cons of employment contracts for practice managers If your practice is part of a large health system, chances are good that the group practice administrator who oversees your practice works under the security of an employment contract. As an office manager in that group, or with a privately owned practice, however, the chances are just as good that you do not.

In many ways, everyone wins when your practice hands out free drug samples. Your patients receive the initial dose of a needed medication immediately, your practice gets credit for providing this convenient service, and the pharmaceutical company introduces patients to medications they will potentially purchase in the future.

If you submit healthcare transactions such as claims and eligibility inquiries in an electronic format, you need to comply with HIPAA's transactions and code sets (TCS) standards and relevant implementation guides to which the standards refer. If you submit those claims in batches, every single claim must meet TCS requirements. And if even one transaction contains an error that makes it noncompliant, your payer may reject the entire batch, even those that are HIPAA-compliant. That can interfere with your cash flow and create costly and time-consuming administrative problems.

When you buy costly office or clinical equipment, you want to make sure that the new item will bring value to your practice. Whether replacing an outdated telephone system, adding a collator to your copier, or purchasing a clinical instrument to add a new service, you need to be sure that you make the best purchasing decision. To determine the cost-effectiveness of your purchase, you want to assure that the potential for profit exists, either through physician and staff labor savings or through additional revenue.

Does a person ever face more difficult decisions while being unable to think clearly than when his or her spouse has just died? When a spouse dies, particularly one who was the primary earner for the household, the surviving spouse must confront complex financial decisions for which he or she may not be prepared.