You have less than two months to make sure that each of your providers – including non-physicians with prescribing privileges – e-prescribes to at least 10 unique Medicare patients. Every provider who fails to meet this requirement will be penalized with a 1% pay cut in 2012.

Your specialty practice can earn a little extra cash by relying more heavily on its non-physician practitioners (NPPs) to interact with patients and bill primary care codes outside the practice walls with home and nursing home visits. The Primary Care Incentive Payment (PCIP) bonus that was intended to reward primary care providers, extends to NPPs regardless of specialty, Part B News learned (PBN 04/21/11).

These charts look at the most financially damaging codes billed by nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs), based on the latest available CMS claims data from 2009.

Can an NPP provide direct supervision for imaging services, or does that have to be done by the physician?

Your providers don’t have to personally register or attest for meaningful use of your electronic health records (EHR) system, but you still can only register or attest for one provider at a time, CMS officials say. Practice managers can now register or attest on behalf of physicians, once physicians link their national provider identifier (NPI) to an Identity and Access Management System (I&A) web user account.

You and your peers have much to gain from implementing electronic health record (EHR) systems, including up to $44,000 in per-provider federal incentive cash and fewer misplaced medical records, but buying an EHR could bring big bonuses in the form of federal tax write-offs, Part B News has learned.

Your peers continue to struggle with Medicare enrollment issues that include CMS’s revalidation process, the usage of locum tenens providers to fill in for your own and how to fill out enrollment forms for doctors who interpret tests electronically from anywhere they can use a laptop. These three topics attracted more questions than almost any other at a recent Medicare enrollment workshop hosted by DecisionHealth.

You have less than two months to make sure that each of your providers – including non-physicians with prescribing privileges – e-prescribes for at least 10 unique Medicare patients. Every provider who fails to meet this requirement will be penalized with a 1% pay cut in 2012. This requirement applies to many providers not well-positioned to e-prescribe, such as practices hoping to e-prescribe via electronic health record (EHRs) systems later this year.

Your state will have a harder time cutting your payments if CMS finalizes a proposed rule aimed at ensuring access to care for Medicaid patients. The proposed rule, published May 6 in the Federal Register, would require states to conduct comprehensive data analyses, based largely on provider and patient input, before making any payment changes to ensure that the modifications don’t prevent access to care.

You won’t get the full story on revenue losses just by looking at denial rates for the codes you bill. Some services aren’t denied often, but because they pay a lot or you bill them more often, they cause bigger cash losses than high-denial codes. This chart examines the most financially damaging codes for four specialties with very high Medicare utilization and patient populations, based on the latest available CMS claims data from 2009.