It looked like any other fax, but the message was chilling - a small practice in the Northeast was being told that in two days, a pair of auditors would show up in person to collect 30 patient medical records and other business records deemed necessary to begin a probe audit of the practice.

You had more success earning a bonus during the 2008 Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) than in 2007. However, there were measures that gave you and your peers more trouble than others. The measures in this benchmark were all reported more than 100,000 times in 2008, according to CMS's Quality-Data Code Submission Error Report.

CMS doled out $92 million in bonus payments to 85,000 of your peers - and perhaps you, too - for successfully completing the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) in 2008. Providers received an average of roughly $1,000, up from about $600 per provider for the six-month reporting period in 2007.

Here's a list of the key personal information you should have about your patients (see story), starting with the obvious and most critical.

Don't be caught off-guard when you crack open your 2010 CPT^® book and find certain surgical musculoskeletal and digestive system codes seemingly missing. A total of 27 new and revised codes are listed out of numerical order in CPT 2010, Part B News has learned.

You'll get paid more for lower-level initial hospital care visits compared to lower-level consultation codes - but you'll first need to brush up on documenting and billing E/M visits in order to get paid. TIP: Review with your physicians the requirements for billing E/M codes, including initial hospital care (99221-99223) right away. You have less than two months before you can no longer use consult billing for your Medicare patients.

In six short weeks, you'll face dramatically different payments for many fee schedule services, with revised practice-expense relative value units (PE-RVUs) based partly on a controversial new dataset. Under the Physician Practice Information Survey (PPIS), PE-RVUs will increase or stay roughly the same for most specialties, but many codes frequently billed by specialties that provide the largest volumes of imaging services will see significant PE-RVU cuts.

You're in a tough spot when a private payer retroactively cancels a patient's coverage, then hits you up for money back on services already rendered. Before you just send the money back and try to bill the patient, use these proven strategies to minimize losses.

The House of Representatives narrowly passed a 1,990-page health reform bill Nov. 7. The massive bill contains several Medicare-related items impacting your bottom-line, but there was no room to address the 21.2% cut to Medicare rates beginning Jan. 1.

Download this month's tool, the DecisionHealth Professional Services Time Score Sheet, from the Part B News website, www.partbnews.com. This DecisionHealth Professional Services tool will help you determine the correct level of service to bill for six inpatient and outpatient E/M encounters. Print out this handy PDF and give it out to your billing staff to refer to when using time to code an E/M service.