Don’t be quick to overlook Medicare’s new annual depression screenings because of the low RVU (0.51, $17.36). The preventive service is intended to take only 15 minutes and can be incorporated into your existing workflow with little effort.

“[CMS] is willing to throw a couple extra bucks to physicians and saying, ‘Not that you’re not already doing this, but we’re going to give you a little extra money if you do it in a formal way,’” says Joan Gilhooly, CPC, president of Medical Business Resources in Lorain, Ohio.

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.”

This chart presents the ratio of paid level 3 E/M visits to paid level 4 E/M visits – both for initial and established patients – at 10 Medicare-heavy specialties. Based on a Part B News analysis of 2010 Medicare claims, the data points for initial visits were determined by taking the total number of paid visits billed as 99203 for each specialty – subtracting all denied visits – and dividing this figure by the total paid 99204 visits. This process was repeated for established patient visits using codes 99213 and 99214.

Your small practice may have to pay tens of thousands of dollars if you fail to keep up with HIPAA safeguards. HHS will collect $100,000 from a five-doctor cardiology practice in Arizona after it unintentionally made public patient appointments from its internal Web-based calendar, HHS says in an April 17 news release.

Does CMS prohibit taking an X-ray on a new patient before the patient is seen?

You could have more time to prepare your practice for ICD-10. CMS released a proposed rule that would delay implementation of the ICD-10 code set until Oct. 1, 2014.

CMS’ much anticipated April 9 announcement came as part of a larger proposed rule, to be published in the April 17Federal Register, which is set to establish new HIPAA standards for electronic transactions.

Your best bet for getting bonus payments from Medicare’s Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) is through registry based reporting, a study shows. But in addition to getting paid for this year’s reporting, using a registry lessens your chances of getting penalized 1.5% in 2015 and 2% in 2016 for failing to report in 2013, a looming mandate for all Medicare providers.

Push your doctors to improve their E/M level selection, and you’ll see your revenue rise because of fewer denials from upcoding and fewer missed opportunities from downcoding. The varying and sometimes inconsistent interpretations by Medicare administrative contractors (MACs) about what documentation qualifies for E/M levels 1 through 5 make 100% accurate level selection impossible.

Your practice’s revenue is at risk if you haven’t performed internal audits on your E/M and procedure claims in the past year.

Pain management, orthopedic or spine practices must carefully read their carriers’ local coverage determinations (LCDs) to prevent denials on lumbar facet blockade procedures, percutaneous vertebroplasty and percutaneous vertebral augmentation (kyphoplasty) claims.