The next time you get a request for records from your carrier or recovery audit contractor (RAC), you would be able to send it electronically under a new CMS pilot program. The Electronic Submission of Medical Documentation (esMD) lets you send any requested record as a PDF document, which typically means you scan or convert the required documents into PDFs. This could reduce the time it takes to meet a records request, although you will probably need to go through your claims clearinghouse to submit information via esMD.

When you attest to having met meaningful use with your EHR, a CMS computer system does a fast, cursory check and then sets the gears in motion to deliver your bonus check, agency officials said during an Aug. 18 open door call. A CMS computer system “almost instantly” calculates attestation results entered on the EHR Incentive Program Registration and Attestation System website, said Travis Broome, an agency official. What’s more, right now there is no real fact-checking going on; as long as the attestation data meets the thresholds, the attestation is successful, he said.

National spending on health care will rise faster than the country's gross domestic product (GDP) over the next 10 years, driven by key provisions in the Affordable Care Act, according to a new CMS report that projects spending statistics through 2020. The result will be "significantly" increased demand for prescription drugs and physician and clinical services, the report says. Healthcare spending is projected to grow at an average rate of 5.8% per year over the next decade, while GDP is projected to grow at just 4.7% per year. The result is that healthcare will grow from being 17.6% of GDP in 2010 to 19.8% of GDP in 2020, says Sean Keehan, an economist in the Office of the Actuary at CMS.

You might be wondering what will happen to your Medicare physician payments after Aug. 2 if Congress and the White House can't agree to boost the federal debt ceiling. On Aug. 2, the government is projected to exceed its debt limit of $14.3 trillion. There's been no official word from CMS, but President Obama did warn on July 12 that failure to raise the debt ceiling could result in Social Security checks, veterans' benefits and other federal obligations not being paid out as scheduled.

You had until June 30, 2011 to e-prescribe at least 10 times and report G8553 to show CMS you were e-prescribing successfully. Now that June 30 has come and gone, many of your peers who didn't meet the requirement are betting that CMS will finalize its proposed rule adding four new hardship exemptions for e-prescribing, so they can avoid the 1% payment penalty in 2012. But there is a plan B just in case the proposed hardship exemptions don't materialize.