Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are moving forward again on crafting a comprehensive health reform bill, but all versions of the legislation include either long-term cuts to Medicare payments or cost-containment measures, Part B News has learned. It's not clear how future cuts would interact with the scheduled 21.5% pay cut for 2010, because the new draft legislation hasn't been released yet.

Your current carrier or Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC) is almost guaranteed to intensify its own auditing process using the same targets chosen by your recovery audit contractor (RAC) when the permanent program begins, CMS and experts say.

There are several reasons that some athletes swear by cross-training: to condition parts of the body that aren’t well targeted by their primary activity, to rest muscles and joints that would otherwise become overused, and to keep workouts interesting.

This story shows that hiring qualified medical office staff members is not an exact science, but there are steps practice managers can take to recruit the best candidates to their practice. There are many processes that will expedite getting the right people through the door, from writing an appealing, informative recruitment ad to screening resumes to calling references.

Personal health records (PHR) are now more widely used by consumers. But do these consumer-controlled records create too much of a privacy threat to mitigate the positive effect they can have on patient education and data exchange between hospitals?

The 2008 Capitation and Risk Contracting Survey, released by the AMGA and ECG Management Consultants, found the following:

Over the past several months, we’ve experienced a growing trend of patients behaving disrespectfully and abusively toward me, my staff members, and the physicians.

This week's question was answered with the assistance of Margie Scalley Vaught, CPC, Coding Content Specialist for DecisionHealth.  

Q. Can you bill codes 95165 (Antigen therapy prep, $11.54) through 95170 (Antigen therapy prep, $9.02) ‘incident to' if a physician assistant or nurse practitioner prepares the vials of antigens?

High-dollar and high-volume services are guaranteed to top the list of targets recovery audit contractors (RACs) will look for, experts say. That makes physical therapy (PT) a particularly obvious target for RACs once the permanent program goes live sometime this summer.

This chart shows how Medicare payments for ten codes commonly billed by non-physician practitioners (NPPs) will change if the proposed 2010 Physician Fee Schedule is implemented.