Your non-physician practitioners (NPPs) stand to benefit from a major health reform provision in the proposed 2011 physician fee schedule (PFS). Physician assistants, nurse practitioners and certified clinical nurse specialists are eligible for a 10% bonus to their payments for primary care services, but there's a catch, an NPP Report analysis shows.

This chart looks at the intensity of non-physician practitioner (NPP) work, as measured by the average number of claims billed by each type of NPP. NOTE: Because Medicare claims data only shows NPP utilization when NPPs bill under their own national provider identifier (NPI), this data excludes all NPP services that were billed incident-to.

New CMS signature requirements can trigger retroactive incident-to denials when a plan of care authored by a physician doesn't contain a valid signature (PBN 3/22/10).

Does a PA have to be credentialed with Medicare to see patients "incident to" a medicare credentialed physician in the practice?

CMS softened several meaningful use requirements in its final rule released July 13 for the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program. Your physicians will have an easier time getting up to $44,000 in Medicare bonuses for using health information technology (HIT). The biggest change: The final rule reduces the number of meaningful use requirements you must satisfy to earn incentive payments.

Your providers would be given considerable flexibility to bill preventive services graded highly by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), but there are a few stumbling blocks you need to be aware of, Part B News has learned.

You'll see your bottom line payments affected by a variety of complicated geographic practice cost index (GPCI) and relative value unit (RVU) changes, assuming the proposed 2011 Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) is finalized. There's actually four separate factors that would affect how your Medicare payments are calculated, making it very difficult to isolate the impact of each one.

The government will eventually pay out $27 billion over the next couple years. How much of that money your practice takes in will depend on when you start meeting meaningful use requirements and whether you qualify for Medicare or Medicaid incentives. Remember: Failing to demonstrate meaningful use by the end of 2014 means your Medicare payments will start to decrease in 2015.

We've reported that CMS has implemented a 2.2% increase to your Medicare payments (PBN 7/12/10). But your payments are set to drastically drop in less than five months and will decrease even more in 2011 unless Congress fixes the Medicare payment formula. This Part B News analysis shows you how much these commonly billed services will decrease after the current payment rate expires on Nov. 30.

This detailed chart shows all 15 core meaningful use requirements, which must be met by providers who want their slice of the $27 billion in electronic health record (EHR) incentives being doled out by Medicare.