Don’t let non-compliant patients prevent you from collecting copay-free revenue from annual wellness visits (AWVs), one of the few Medicare services with a lopsided profit margin. You can bill AWVs with minimal denial or audit risk by documenting uncooperative patient behavior and doing your part under the letter of the rule, experts say.

Make attesting for stage 1 meaningful use easier by factoring in some of the proposed meaningful use stage 2 requirements into your current workflow. Regardless of what stage of the electronic health records (EHR) process you are in, “you can’t really be focused on stage 1 without considering stage 2,” says Todd Searls, director of regional extension center (REC) operations for Wide River Technology Extension Center in Lincoln, Neb.

Your practice must be prepared for several changes starting July 1, many of which affect reimbursement. Here’s a rundown of important CMS programs and mandates that require your action:

These charts depict the five specialties that are most and least likely to accept new Medicaid and new Medicare patients. All data come from a survey of 2,232 physicians across all specialties conducted this April by Jackson Healthcare, a healthcare staffing company in Alpharetta, Ga.

Can providers bill for review of medical records after a patient visit? It usually takes 20 minutes.

Prevent hiccups in your payments when CMS begins enforcing the HIPAA 5010 standard for all electronic claims July 1 by asking direct questions of your clearinghouse or payers to guarantee your claims will be paid. Some health plans are accepting claims as 5010-compliant during the Jan. 1 through June 30 discretionary period that may no longer pass muster on July .

Keep updated on brewing drug shortages and develop a contingency plan to mitigate their damaging effects on your practice. The number of drug shortages has skyrocketed in recent years. More than 200 drugs are on the shortages lists, not including vaccines, immune globulin and other biologics. 

Your longstanding but technically illegal habit of allowing non-physician staff to log into CMS’ web-based Provider Enrollment Chain and Ownership System (PECOS) using the physician’s username and password soon will become legal under a new surrogate program. But you must first learn to navigate the program’s multiple registration scenarios.

A physician or coder might be tempted to assign a higher level of service to a claim that uses one comment in a physician’s documentation for the history of present illness (HPI) and review of systems (ROS), but that practice can lead to denials.

Practices continue to struggle with whether one physician comment in his documentation can count in the HPI and ROS, as evidenced by a recent string on the Part B News listserv.