Your claims won’t be rejected because of enrollment issues with an ordering/referring provider starting Jan. 3 (PBN 11/15/10). CMS has officially backed off the deadline, but has not backed away from the policy.

Do all practices in a given specialty collect around the same amount of money for physician work? This chart shows the annual amount of money collected for professional charges (excluding technical component and amounts collected from work by non-physician practitioners or NPPs).

Colonoscopies and EGD's carry a [zero-day] global period as they are deemed endoscopic procedures. My question is can the physician charge an E/M code if he schedules the procedure and sees the patient all on the same day? Or is the pre-op visit/H&P included in the procedure code?

You are now guaranteed stable Medicare reimbursement rates for one year. President Barack Obama signed the Medicare and Medicaid Extenders Act of 2010 on Dec. 15. The new law will prevent cuts of roughly 30% to physician payments in 2011 (PBN 12/13/10) and will allow CMS to adjust its conversion factor up from the reduced rate of $25.5217 found in the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule.

You'll face some big new changes when it comes to immunization billing in 2011, thanks to new codes that will affect both your older patients on the Medicare side and your pediatric patients on the private-payer side.

Your work is cut out for you when it comes to wound care coding in 2011, thanks to CPT changes aimed at making debridement services easier to bill. There are code deletions, new add-on codes and new documentation requirements, experts say.

You will face the latest set of Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) edits when you return to work on Jan. 3. CCI version 17.0 technically takes effect Jan. 1, but Jan. 3 is the first business day of 2011. This newest round of edits contains a total of 29,600 changes, up from the 19,702 changes in CCI version 16.3 (PBN 9/27/10), a Part B  News analysis shows.

The latest version of the Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) edits (version 17.0) brings 19,595 new code pairs, deletes 9,559, and includes significantly more mutually exclusive additions and deletions than version 16.3. Check out the official Part B News CCI Scorecard for a complete breakdown.

Your practice can see patients more quickly while making fewer paperwork errors using online, electronic patient registration tools, a growing technological trend that will boost your bottom line, practice managers say. Caveat: These services aren't free and come with a learning curve both for your staff and patients, which could slow you down at least temporarily when your existing paper-based system already works well.

Expect to see physician involvement during medical necessity reviews conducted by Medicare Advantage (MA) plans, thanks to a new requirement proposed by CMS. This would prevent MA plan officials without direct knowledge of providing medical care from making unfavorable decisions when auditing your claims.