Waiting room wireless Internet access (Wi-Fi) could decrease claims denials from data entry errors and increase your patients’ satisfaction with your practice. Pulmonary and Allergy Associates PA is planning to install Wi-Fi for patients in its waiting room, separate from the network its staff uses, says Larry Epstein, CEO of the Summit, N.J., practice.

When your practice offers payment plans to patients, make sure those plans don’t run afoul of the federal Truth in Lending Act.

You’ve likely been getting more patient requests than ever to set up a payment plan, particularly in the first quarter because of high-deductible health plans. In fact, 54% of 284 respondents to a January Part B News deductibles survey said more patients have asked about payment plans in the last few months. While some practices have opted to outsource the plans to a third-party credit card processing company, you still must take steps to ensure your plan is legal (PBN 2/6/12).

This graph presents ratios of new patient visits to established patient visits for 16 specialties – eight specialties with the largest ratios and eight with the smallest ratios. The data, based on a Part B News analysis of 2010 Medicare claims data, was generated by dividing the total service count for each specialty’s E/M visits coded as 99201-99205 by the specialty’s service count of claims coded with 99211-99215. A larger ratio signifies an overall office visit balance that skews heavily toward new patients, a ratio of exactly one would mean an equal amount of new and established visits and a ratio closer to zero means the specialty relies mostly on established patient visits. Specialties that rarely billed Medicare for office visits were excluded from consideration. 

 If a physician performs a 29822(limited debridement of the rotator cuff) and 29826(subacromial decompression) on the same shoulder, how do you code the service since 29822 used to be bundled into 29826 but now can be reported only as an add-on code according to CPT?

Your practice’s last hope for retrieving money lost from the 1% penalty for the e-Prescribing (e-Rx) Incentive Program is to informally appeal to your Medicare administrative contractor (MAC) or the QualityNet help desk. If you don’t, you stand to lose thousands of dollars in reimbursements this year.

Be prepared to field more questions from patients about the services you’ve already provided now that CMS went live with an easier-to-read redesign of the Medicare Summary Notice (MSN).

Hundreds if not thousands of applications have been developed for providers to use on mobile devices, but making the effort to research and vet apps to find the best ones for you can save your practice time and money.

As you begin your electronic health records (EHR) workflow planning, don’t feel overwhelmed by the timelines. You would avoid Medicare payment penalties as long as you begin attestation by 2016 for stage 2 meaningful use.

Now that patients will receive a clear set of instructions about how to report fraud – including a phone number, examples of fraud and the prospects of a personal reward – here’s how expert health care attorneys recommend you respond:

New details on the ICD-10 delay were scarce at the ICD-9-CM Coordination and Maintenance Committee Meeting in Baltimore on March 5.