Early-intervention drug and alcohol screening can be a valuable service for your patients, yet many providers are leaving the preventive effort -- and the reimbursement associated with it -- on the table.
Medicare covers a series of early-intervention services known as screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment (SBIRT). While usage is trending up, the services overall are poorly utilized, notes Jim Winkle, MPH, family medicine faculty member at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Ore.
One of the main impediments to more physicians conducting SBIRT is the lack of a workflow process among practices. Yet Winkle has a solution -- an easy-to-implement workflow map that practices can use to start conducting SBIRT services. Check out the
workflow tools on the SBIRT Oregon website,