You won’t be able to report a key hypertension measure for the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) program until April 1 and will lose all potential reporting opportunities between Jan. 1 through March 31. That could jeopardize your bonus.

Don’t assume the burden of educating patients about their payment responsibilities on your own. Instead, seek a local business partner to help you teach patients about their health plans – particularly the high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) – and you’ll improve collections and patient relations.

You’re not alone if Medicare has been denying your claims or recouping funds for place-of-service (POS) errors for your provider’s hospital services. Protect your revenue and prevent those denials by closely coordinating your practice’s billing department with the hospital’s, experts tell Part B News.

Physician practices and hospitals are rarely in sync, especially when it comes to place of service (POS) billing. And because of that, your practice stands to lose thousands of dollars because of coding errors for services your physician performed in a hospital.

It’s up to your practice to make the hospital-practice relationship more transparent.

This chart reflects how your peers wish to incorporate electronic health records (EHR) by breaking down the exact types of information they want to share with other medical offices electronically but currently share via paper, phone or fax.

How do you report an anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) performed by both a neurosurgeon and orthopedic surgeon, even though they weren’t co-surgeons but simply did their respective portion of the procedure? Do you report 22551-22562 (arthrodesis procedure codes set)?

Struggling to collect from patients with high deductible health plans (HDHPs)? This tool gives you multi-faceted bullet points on how to develop a workflow process to improve collections from both new and existing patients.

Your providers are safe from the impending 27.4% cut to their Medicare payments set to hit March 1 thanks to Congress passing a temporary ‘doc fix’ Feb. 17 through the end of 2012.

Important: Congress originally approved a two-month fix that was set to expire Feb. 29 that will now last through Dec. 31. President Obama hadn’t yet signed the bill extension into law as this issue went to press.

Any plans you may have to begin transitioning to ICD-10 should now be put on hold in light of last week’s announcement that HHS intends to delay the ICD-10 implementation date beyond Oct. 1, 2013, the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) instructs.