This chart shows the Medicare services with the highest improper payment rates along with the percentage of overall Medicare fee-for-service improper payments that service’s improper payments represent. The data, which come from CMS’ 2011 Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) report released in August, include both underpayments and overpayments, although the majority were overpayments.

How do you correctly code Procrit (Epoetin alpha) for patients who don’t have end stage renal disease (ESRD)? Does the coding differ if the facility is a federally qualified health clinic?

Spend a few minutes calling your Medicare administrative contractor (MAC) or using its electronic portal to track whether your patient already received an initial annual wellness visit (AWV). If you don’t and the patient hasn’t had that initial AWV, you could be squandering an extra $55 by billing the subsequent instead of initial AWV.

Providers have seven new CPT codes that describe similar services to Medicare’s post-discharge care management G-code in the proposed physician fee schedule.

The AMA’s recently released 2013 CPT data set introduced the E/M codes for “transitional care management services.”

Pay attention to a notice from your Medicare administrative contractor (MAC) about when your practice will be subject to a new manual medical review of claims for patients who have reached the $3,700 therapy threshold.

The MAC will tell you when your reviews will start – Oct. 1, Nov. 1 or Dec. 1, says Stephen Levine, PT, DPT, MSHA, partner, Fearon & Levine Consulting, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The changes are effective through Dec. 31.

Your practice can’t afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to recover from a breach of patients’ protected health information (PHI) stored or transmitted on mobile devices. Anything that can be easily lost or stolen should be encrypted, says Stanley Nachimson, a former CMS technology expert with a Reisterstown, Md.-based consulting firm. Breaches caused by stolen laptops, iPhones and tablets are becoming more common as practices incorporate mobile technology.

Don’t assume once you’ve successfully attested for meaningful use that your hard-earned incentive payment is yours to keep. After months of speculation that meaningful use audits were on the way, Figliozzi & Company, a CPA firm contracted by CMS, began sending out the first round of audits in July, according to Ober Kaler, a law firm representing practices subjected to the audits.

These charts depict the median annual salaries for seven non-provider job titles. The bottom chart breaks down the administrator salaries by small, medium and large practice sizes. All data comes from the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) book, Management Compensation Survey: 2012 Report Based on 2011 Data, available at http://tinyurl.com/9cs3dcc. The average compensations listed below represent surveys of 7,907 managers at 1,306 medical practices.

How do you define “prescription drug management?” Specifically, how do coders translate the details of the portion of medical decision-making according to CMS’ 1995 & 1997 documentation guidelines?

Good news for providers: You won’t have to attest to meeting stage 2 meaningful use requirements for electronic health records (EHRs) until 2014, and your attestation need only cover 90 days of that first year. The stage 2 meaningful use final rule released by CMS on Aug. 22, also makes it clear that the clock is ticking on stage 1: Eligible providers who don’t register and attest by Oct. 1, 2014, will see their payments cut beginning in 2015.