Time is running out for you to submit claims for services provided in 2009. Carriers are reminding practices that the rules for timely claims submission has changed and physicians no longer have up to 27 months to file a claim for reimbursement. All claims must be filed within 12 months.

The Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC) First Coast says practices should "allow time for mailing as the timeliness is calculated on the contractor receipt date, not the postmark date of when it is mailed."

Private or physician-owned medical groups outperformed their hospital- and integrated delivery system-owned counterparts, according to a recent Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) survey.

"Not-hospital/IDS-owned medical groups reported a slight increase in total relative value units (RVUs) per patient (0.09 percent) and a nearly 13% increase in work RVUs per patient," the MGMA said in a press release on its "Cost Survey for Multispecialty Practices: 2010 Report Based on 2009 Data." "Multispecialty groups that were hospital/IDS-owned reported a slight decrease in total RVUs per patient (0.55%) and a 17.85 % decrease in work RVUs per patient."

Read more on MGMA medical group data

There are now 62 federally funded Regional Extension Centers (RECs) that will help you and your peers achieve meaningful use with electronic health record (EHR) systems, HHS announced today. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) selected two additional organizations that will cover Orange County, Calif. and the entire state of New Hampshire. They are the CalOptima Foundation and Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, respectively (read more on RECs and what they do) ...

It's now been six months since Congress passed the sweeping health care reform bill, after a heated and heavily partisan public debate.

To mark this milestone, HHS released a well-crafted promotional video on Sept. 23, when an additional eight provisions of the reform law went into effect.

Here's a quick rundown on the newly active health reform measures (read more on health reform law provisions) ...

The House of Representatives approved a bill that would prevent executives and managers involved in a Medicare fraud case from coming back and leading another company billing Medicare services.

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) sponsored the Strengthening Medicare Anti-Fraud Measures Act of 2010 to give HHS the power to permanently exclude any officer or managing employee involved in instances of fraud from the Medicare program. Currently, only individuals with an ownership or controlling interest of a company can be banned, the bill says.

"This bill is an important, bipartisan measure that will protect Medicare beneficiaries and taxpayers," Stark says. "It closes two loopholes that allow executives and corporations who defraud Medicare to keep doing business."

Click here to read more on Medicare fraud bill