March 31st 2025
Consolidation can create benefits, along with organizational gaps. Here’s how a strategic plan can help.
Depression management lags, but PCPs may hold the key
May 25th 2016Primary care physicians commonly screen their patients for depression, but still underuse established and effective care management practices compared to other chronic illnesses like diabetes, asthma, and congestive heart failure, according to a recent study published in Health Affairs.
How physicians can get paid for home visits
May 25th 2016DOWLING Contributing authorGETTING PAID FOR HOME VISITSRenee Dowling is a billing andcoding consultant with VEIConsulting in Indianapolis, Indiana.Send your coding questions to:medec@advanstar.com.I am in private practice and recently did a home visit, one-hour evaluation for the first time. What is the code for the initial home visit and then subsequent visits?
How physicians can prepare now before CMS removes the ICD-10 safety net
May 25th 2016On October 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ grace period for denials of claims under ICD-10 will end. Physicians will do well to recognize that while the updated and expanded standards for coding specificity offer a new level of accuracy, they may also affect the bottom line.
Administrative costs are killing U.S. healthcare
May 21st 2016The United States faces an unenviable paradox: the healthcare sector is an important source of job growth and economic output, but healthcare costs-now comprising nearly one fifth of economic output-are dramatically higher than those in other developed nations, and continue to rise.
Tough questions to ask vendors about HIPAA compliance
May 18th 2016The cloud revolution has many wonderful advantages such as lower costs, faster ROI and more powder in the hands of customers. However, when using cloud services your company data is no longer hosted on your physical IT infrastructure so there are some new legal and technical issues that have to be addressed.
Primary care must be the mental health medical home
May 14th 2016As a primary care physician, my responsibility to my patients goes beyond just caring for their physical well-being. My obligation-professional and ethical-is to treat the whole person and that means attending to their mental health as well.
How to capture chronic care revenue with an IT infrastructure
May 10th 2016When Curtis Story, MD, a solo primary care physician in Port Charlotte, Florida, first heard that Medicare would begin paying physicians for offering patients chronic care management (CCM), he was optimistic that the additional revenue would bolster his practice for work it was already doing. But more than a year later, he has yet to bill for CCM.
Government, payers working to streamline quality measures
May 10th 2016In the average medical practice, the burden on physicians to meet differing quality measurement standards set by payers is substantial. Commercial health plans, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and state Medicaid managed care plans all have different metrics for evaluating quality care.