The Republicans’ Affordable Care Act (ACA) repeal-and-replace bill, the American Health Care Act (AHCA) released Feb. 6, neither repeals nor replaces the law popularly known as Obamacare. The 123-page bill retains to a large extent the original ACA legal framework for regulating insurance plans and their purchases. And here’s another similarity with Obamacare: It has politicians rushing to denounce it.

If you have 15 or fewer providers – and even if you have more – you can get free help with the quality payment program (QPP) and avoid being one of of the small practices CMS has judged susceptible to QPP penalties.

You’ll find a cap on how much time you can bill for non-face-to-face prolonged services, numerous injection-code bundles and a revised limit on cerumen-removal coding among other updates in the latest Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) quarterly release.

Effective Jan. 1, CMS released 18 new HCPCS codes — all J codes — to replace 12 C codes and two Q codes for drugs.

When it comes to billing transitional care management (TCM) codes 99495 and 99496, it appears practice truly does make perfect — or something close. Following some early hiccups, practices netted more than $103 million in reimbursement for TCM claims in 2015, the latest year of available Medicare claims data.

Physician practices are working with a new set of rules when it comes to engaging patients online and encouraging them to view their medical records, and the new Advancing Care Information (ACI) program has made some standards easier to reach than those under the meaningful use program that it replaced.
Under the revised rules for the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), many minimum reporting thresholds under ACI are lower than those imposed under modified Stage 2 and Stage 3 meaningful use, and physicians are required to report on fewer measures using a more streamlined scoring system.