Does your carrier have the right address for your practice? Verify your practice location with your carrier if you have any doubt the right address is on file. It could save you from having your billing privileges revoked when the carrier visits your on-file address to find that you're not there anymore. 

Sometime between now and Nov. 30, Medicare carriers will be sending solo doctors and non-physician practitioners (NPPs) some informational brochures. There's nothing newsworthy about the brochures, but here's the catch: when they go to an invalid address, the Medicare billing privileges for the provider tied to that address will be deactivated.

How would you feel about a three-year break from new diagnosis codes? That is just one option under consideration by the CMS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to ease the burden leading into the Oct. 1, 2013, implementation of ICD-10-CM/PCS.

Region B's Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) has released targets for all seven states in its jurisdiction: Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. The Oct. 14 release means all 50 states now have targets.

Download this month's tool, DecisionHealth Professional Services' E/M inpatient checklist, from the Part B News website, www.partbnews.com.

This week's question is answered by Margie Scalley Vaught, CPC, coding content specialist for DecisionHealth, publisher of Part B News.

Q. I am having trouble getting paid for post-procedure follow-up visits in the hospital. Medicare pays the initial consult and the follow-up(s) leading to the surgery or procedure. However, any follow-up after the procedure gets a denial. Is there any way to get these paid?

When you lose too many staff members because of the swine flu, you potentially face an unpleasant and rare situation: closing your practice.

This chart shows the top 10 most frequently billed codes in 2008 and their net change in utilization from 2007. Drug codes, technical codes and non-physician services (such as lab services) were excluded from consideration, so E/M codes top this list.

There's been an abrupt slowing of a recent downward trend in annual E/M utilization, according to a Part B News analysis of new, 2008 CMS claims data (see main story). The total number of E/M services billed to Medicare fell by about 340,000 claims from 2007 to 2008 - a remarkable change from 2006 and 2007, which saw E/M utilization fall by 4.3 million and 3.6 million claims respectively (PBN 11/17/08).

These pie charts examine the five E/M codes used for established patient office visits, showing their respective percentage share of all established visit E/M utilization. We compare the utilization percentage of each code in 2000, 2007 and 2008; this long window shows a slow but steady shift to billing more high-level codes like 99214 and 99215.