TrailBlazer Health Enterprises lost its CMS contract to Highmark Medicare Services on March 1. CMS denied Trailblazer’s petition March 1 and is moving forward with the merging of Jurisdiction 4 into Jurisdiction JH, which will be all Highmark’s territory, according to the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) report on TrailBlazer’s petition of the change.

Be prepared to meet even stricter electronic health records (EHR) reporting requirements, but also to benefit from improved interoperability and vendor responses to specialty-specific provisions, now that CMS released its proposed rule for stage 2 meaningful use.

Don’t assume the burden of educating patients about their payment responsibilities on your own. Instead, seek a local business partner to help you teach patients about their health plans – particularly the high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) – and you’ll improve collections and patient relations.

Physician practices and hospitals are rarely in sync, especially when it comes to place of service (POS) billing. And because of that, your practice stands to lose thousands of dollars because of coding errors for services your physician performed in a hospital.

It’s up to your practice to make the hospital-practice relationship more transparent.

This chart reflects how your peers wish to incorporate electronic health records (EHR) by breaking down the exact types of information they want to share with other medical offices electronically but currently share via paper, phone or fax.