A change to the therapy cap calculation means more work for practices starting Oct. 1.

CMS will count therapy a patient received in a hospital outpatient department toward the cap, set in 2012 at $1,880 for occupational therapy and $1,880 for physical and speech therapies, said Stewart Streimer, director of CMS’s provider billing group during an April 17 call. CMS will not reprocess claims, but, starting Oct. 1 it will recalculate a patient’s services toward the therapy cap amount retroactive to Jan. 1, he said.

This chart shows the turnover rates last year of two types of non physician practitioners (NPPs) – physician assistants (PAs) and nurse practitioners (NPs). All data comes from the 2011 Physician Retention Survey, a joint effort of the American Medical Group Association (AMGA) and Cejka Search, a health care recruitment company.

You and your peers have been leery about using CMS’ online Provider Enrollment Chain Ownership System (PECOS) for years, but two new upgrades have hit and they are making processing faster, especially for revalidations. First, a “fast-track” view was added in February that lets you skip doing an entire enrollment when revalidating information for providers already in PECOS.

Regardless of what stage of ICD-10 implementation you achieved before CMS proposed a one-year delay this month, use the extra time to convince your physicians that ICD-10 training is essential. The necessity to take advantage of the additional year rather than perceive it as a chance to blow off preparation was a message reinforced in several sessions of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) ICD-10 Summit in Baltimore last week.

Save your practice potentially thousands of dollars of recouped funds by using regular audits to find coding and documentation errors before your payers do.

“You don’t want your practice to lose money earned because you failed to find an error; you want to protect yourself,” says Tori Kreher, compliance officer for the Orthopedic Center of Southern Illinois in Mt. Vernon, who performs annual audits for her practice. “If you correct it, it won’t cause you as much [of a] problem in the long run.”