Medicare pays more than $1 billion annually to physicians for pathology services, according to the 2005 Office of Inspector General (OIG) Work Plan. To ensure that physicians are ordering proper, medically necessary tests for their patients and engaging in compliant, legal relationships with the labs that process their pathology samples, the OIG decided to take a closer look at physician pathology services.

Part one of a two-part series. With the amount of turnover in the physician practice industry today, it's a safe bet that at some point, a departing or former employee will call on you to write a letter of reference. Most practice administrators are only too glad to help out, but not everyone has a firm grasp on the best way to help the ex-employee while also protecting the practice.

We could all use a little downtime during our workday. But for physicians and their staff, there's nothing relaxing about the sight of an empty waiting room or exam room. Chances are it means a patient has missed an appointment. Missed appointments are a growing source of an­noy­ance for physician practices-they are lost revenue opportunities when costs are rising. Throughout the industry, practices are now looking for any possible solutions to stem the rising tide of troubles caused by patient no-shows.

Last month, I worked with yet another practice that had been the victim of embezzlement. The embezzler was successful because the practice did not use the tools available to track the accounting and posting of all charge tickets. Each day, the embezzler pocketed a few encounter copays and destroyed the charge tickets.

For most, a night at the theatre means people dancing around dressed as cats, an audience singing along to Abba's greatest hits, or Nathan Lane hamming it up But for Barry Levy, MD, a licensed internist and adjunct professor of public health at Tufts University School of Medicine in Massachusetts , a night of theater means something else entirely. For starters, he's usually performing rather than watching, and the material . . . well, the material is something Irving Berlin never would have imagined.

Last month, we looked closely at Health Savings Accounts (HSA), a relatively new type of health benefit program that combines high deductible health insurance plans with special tax-free accounts that allow consumers to put aside large sums of money for future healthcare needs