Oncology clinics traditionally house some of the most vulnerable patients when it comes to contracting dangerous infections, further compounding the already debilitating effects of cancer treatments such as chemotherapy. Because of this, it's doubly important that oncology clinics have a plan in place to protect their patient population.

In January, the American College of Physicians (ACP) issued a sixth edition of its ethics manual, the first rewrite since 2005. The revised manual, published in ACP's flagship journal Annals of Internal Medicine, offers new guidance on issues such as end-of-life care, physician-industry relations, and ethics in medical research.

You may be entitled to an extra 2% in interest, potentially thousands of dollars, on your Medicare claims because of claims disruptions caused by the switch to HIPAA 5010. But getting the pay boost could prove difficult, as you must first prove you deserve it.

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.

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.