Your claims for the interpretation of a diagnostic service - the professional component - need to show the actual place of service (POS) and date of service (DOS) the physician read the results of a test or image, CMS says.

By just about any measure, Joint Commission accreditation is an affirmation that your physician practice has reached the pinnacle of professionalism, particularly in quality and patient safety issues.

You now have two months before the 21.29% Medicare physician pay cut hits (see story), but don't wring your hands just yet: experts predict 2010 will be the year of the permanent pay fix. Even more profound will be the impact of a final health reform bill, which could become law at the end of January.

We asked several experts on reimbursement and contracting issues to offer predictions for 2010, and the response ranged from greater collaboration and cooperation to more audits and review. And not surprisingly, most expect reimbursements to drop.

As we begin 2010, here's a look at how Part B News' predictions for 2009 turned out.

Below is a sampling of stories describing situations that contend with OSHA and employee safety regulations to help illustrate that point. These extreme but true tales will make even a novice safety officer cringe.

Ongoing health reform efforts in Congress should dominate your attention span because it promises to bring profound change to your practice. You're also concerned with last-ditch efforts to fix the more than 21% cut to Medicare payments staring you in the face. But these are not the only things you need to be aware of to bill successfully in 2010.

For many high-utilization codes, it's deletions in the latest set of Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) edits that have the most impact, according to a Part B News analysis of CMS claims data from 2008 and changes in CCI version 16.0, in effect since Jan. 1 (PBN 12/21/09).

CMS will ring in the New Year with a temporary payment hold on your claims. According to a CMS list-serve notice issued Dec. 21, carriers will hold claims for ten business days (Jan. 1 to Jan. 15, 2010). CMS is taking this step to avoid the confusion that has resulted when Congress passed a pay fix soon after the start of the year and carriers had to reprocess all of the claims that were submitted in the interim.

There's good news and bad news for your drug billing as 2010 kicks off. Aggregate payments for the top 50 drugs billed to Medicare are expected to dip by 1.1%, although more individual drug codes will see boosts than cuts in the first quarter of 2010 under Medicare's average sales price (ASP) +6% payment system.