Weed out any potential electronic health records (EHR) meaningful use attestation issues now, in the final days before the 90-day reporting period begins on Oct. 1, to ensure you receive your $18,000 bonus without any hiccups. A host of problems can arise during the 90 days while others can be solved with staff training and workflow shuffling.

Your coders will have to get familiar with nearly 250,000 new code pairs – a hundred times more than were released in the third quarter – in CMS’ latest National Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) edits effective Oct. 1. The majority of added edit pairs have been related to general surgery and trigger point injections. Plus, all edit pairs, except for Category III pairs, were coupled with wound repair codes.

Your private pay rates change at least every year without the same consistency and reliability that comes with Medicare’s annual fee schedule. And if you’re not keeping track, you’re losing money. Keep more revenue by monitoring your private payer reimbursements and maintaining your own fee schedules for all payers.

This chart shows the Medicare services with the highest improper payment rates along with the percentage of overall Medicare fee-for-service improper payments that service’s improper payments represent. The data, which come from CMS’ 2011 Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) report released in August, include both underpayments and overpayments, although the majority were overpayments.

How do you correctly code Procrit (Epoetin alpha) for patients who don’t have end stage renal disease (ESRD)? Does the coding differ if the facility is a federally qualified health clinic?

Spend a few minutes calling your Medicare administrative contractor (MAC) or using its electronic portal to track whether your patient already received an initial annual wellness visit (AWV). If you don’t and the patient hasn’t had that initial AWV, you could be squandering an extra $55 by billing the subsequent instead of initial AWV.

Providers have seven new CPT codes that describe similar services to Medicare’s post-discharge care management G-code in the proposed physician fee schedule.

The AMA’s recently released 2013 CPT data set introduced the E/M codes for “transitional care management services.”

Pay attention to a notice from your Medicare administrative contractor (MAC) about when your practice will be subject to a new manual medical review of claims for patients who have reached the $3,700 therapy threshold.

The MAC will tell you when your reviews will start – Oct. 1, Nov. 1 or Dec. 1, says Stephen Levine, PT, DPT, MSHA, partner, Fearon & Levine Consulting, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The changes are effective through Dec. 31.

Your practice can’t afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to recover from a breach of patients’ protected health information (PHI) stored or transmitted on mobile devices. Anything that can be easily lost or stolen should be encrypted, says Stanley Nachimson, a former CMS technology expert with a Reisterstown, Md.-based consulting firm. Breaches caused by stolen laptops, iPhones and tablets are becoming more common as practices incorporate mobile technology.

Don’t assume once you’ve successfully attested for meaningful use that your hard-earned incentive payment is yours to keep. After months of speculation that meaningful use audits were on the way, Figliozzi & Company, a CPA firm contracted by CMS, began sending out the first round of audits in July, according to Ober Kaler, a law firm representing practices subjected to the audits.