Speed your Medicare enrollment process by following these 5 enrollment tips offered directly by a top CMS official at March 26 public forum. Part B News  attended the conference, sponsored by the American Health Lawyers Association (AHLA), and compiled the following list of tips from Jim Bossenmeyer, CMS's director of provider and supplier enrollment.

This week's question is answered by John Bishop, senior consultant for DecisionHealth Professional Services.

Q.   We are a primary care practice with a sleep lab. We are trying to determine if the primary care doctor needs an initial consult from a board-certified physician first in order for the sleep test and the continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) to be paid. Is it OK for a primary care physician to order the sleep study as long as he performs the initial assessment (sleep scale, BMI, neck circumference, etc.)? He isn't board-certified. Is it all right if a sleep, board-certified physician reads the actual test?

Medical Group Management Association consultants Rosemarie Nelson and Cindy Dunn have identified 10 lessons for those considering electronic health records (EHRs).

You need to actively monitor key performance data and respond accordingly - if you want to do more than just scrape through the economic hurricane, experts say. Most practices know when they're losing money, but there's more to running a business than just knowing when you're in the red, says Larry Gold, a practice management expert with DecisionHealth Consulting Services. "Doctors tend to make emotional decisions," Gold says. "But you need to look at the data on a weekly basis, then ask yourself dispassionately, ‘what's changed and what do I about it?'" 

CMS will use the most favorable outcome of two calculations for providers reporting the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) fluoroscopic measure that erroneously contains 22 CPT codes for non-fluoroscopic procedures (PBN 3/30/09).