Quick quiz: Which of the following members of your practice should subscribe to your Medicare administrative carrier’s (MAC) Medicare enewsletter?
- Billers
- Coders
- Nurses
- Physicians
- Compliance managers
- Everyone in the practice
If you selected 6, you're correct. That’s the message from WPS GHA, the MAC for jurisdictions 5 and 8, in its Feb. 25 enewsletter.
“CMS has instructed that every Medicare provider (including physicians, nurses, and billing staff) should subscribe to eNews. It is a common misconception that only one person in an office can subscribe to WPS GHA Medicare eNews; CMS and WPS GHA encourage and expect all Medicare providers, and their staff, to subscribe to eNews.”
You may have to look around your MAC’s website a bit to find the sign up form so we provided them below. It’s a good idea to have each member of your practice complete the sign up process because they may need to set a password and select the type of information they want to receive, for example, specialty-specific information.
You’ll need to follow up with staff to make sure they’re signed up, reading the newsletters and following the MAC’s guidance. You can reinforce the guidance from your MAC during regular training sessions and review claims to make sure people are keeping up.
Remember, this requirement creates a potentially costly compliance catch-22 for practices. If members don’t subscribe to the newsletters, they’re not complying with a requirement. If members subscribe but don’t read or follow the guidance and submit claims that trigger overpayments as a result, investigators can say the practice was committing fraud because it knew or should have known it wasn’t following the rules.
This may seem like a trap – and in a way it is – but it will increase the chance that staff will identify changes before they balloon into denials, or worse.
Resources (MAC eNews sign up links):