Do all practices in a given specialty collect around the same amount of money for physician work? This chart shows the annual amount of money collected for professional charges (excluding technical component and amounts collected from work by non-physician practitioners or NPPs).

Colonoscopies and EGD's carry a [zero-day] global period as they are deemed endoscopic procedures. My question is can the physician charge an E/M code if he schedules the procedure and sees the patient all on the same day? Or is the pre-op visit/H&P included in the procedure code?

The sense of fear and intimidation in the voice was impossible to ignore. It was a call to HCPro’s OSHA consultation hotline. In barely a whisper, so that nobody in her office could overhear her, the caller asked, “Do I really have to train my physicians in bloodborne pathogens? OSHA doesn’t require them to undergo training like the rest of the practice’s staff, does it?”

If you received a citation during an OSHA inspection in the past year, chances are the inspector found something wrong with your exposure control plan (ECP). If you didn’t get inspected, chances are there is still something wrong with your ECP.

Who is responsible when an independent physician discriminates against or harasses a hospital employee? The hospital? The medical staff?

Denied claims are just a part of doing business, but that doesn’t mean you can write them off. You knew it was a legitimate claim when you submitted it, so you should be willing to fight for the money you are rightly owed.

You are now guaranteed stable Medicare reimbursement rates for one year. President Barack Obama signed the Medicare and Medicaid Extenders Act of 2010 on Dec. 15. The new law will prevent cuts of roughly 30% to physician payments in 2011 (PBN 12/13/10) and will allow CMS to adjust its conversion factor up from the reduced rate of $25.5217 found in the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule.

You'll face some big new changes when it comes to immunization billing in 2011, thanks to new codes that will affect both your older patients on the Medicare side and your pediatric patients on the private-payer side.

Your work is cut out for you when it comes to wound care coding in 2011, thanks to CPT changes aimed at making debridement services easier to bill. There are code deletions, new add-on codes and new documentation requirements, experts say.

You will face the latest set of Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) edits when you return to work on Jan. 3. CCI version 17.0 technically takes effect Jan. 1, but Jan. 3 is the first business day of 2011. This newest round of edits contains a total of 29,600 changes, up from the 19,702 changes in CCI version 16.3 (PBN 9/27/10), a Part B  News analysis shows.