Practice Management

In light of the current economic recession, patients must realize that many doctors will begin to charge for goods and services that up until now have been free and taken for granted.

A new report from UnitedHealth Group says the U.S. healthcare system could reduce costs by $332 billion over the next 10 years if healthcare providers update their technology.

Medicare is proposing a rule that would simplify reporting requirements for the Electronic Prescribing Incentive Program and the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative and set the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule for calendar year 2010.

Physicians fail to tell patients about abnormal results in one out of every 14 medical tests, according to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Paying based strictly on RVUs often results in a physician who is far more concerned about production than about quality or effectiveness of patient care.

I'm afraid one of my employees is stealing from my practice. What should I do regarding legal action against him?

Codes for nursing facility typical times are designed to parallel hospital inpatient codes.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus said that current reform efforts will not likely include a permanent fix to the Medicare fee-for-service physician payment system.

The challenge: Figuring out when a patient's actions terminate the physician-patient relationship

According to coding protocol, you can report only one initial immunization code per visit.

A Massachusetts committee on healthcare payment reform will recommend switching the state's fee-for-service payment system to a capitated or "global" payment model.

Let's take a look at how a "utopian medical practice" in the not-too-distant future functions from the perspectives of the patient, physician, office staff, nurse, billing department, and referred physician.

For the first time in his 12-year hospital career, Kevin Deighton, MD, had a choice to make: In six months, he could either go solo, find another employer, or unite with other physicians to launch their own practice.

The AMA and groups representing hospitals, health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, device makers, and labor groups vowed to do their part to save the country as much as $2 trillion by slowing healthcare expense growth by 1.5 percent over the next decade.

The American Academy of Professional Coders, which in April released a five-year training plan to prepare coders and physicians for ICD-10, recommends all practices start analyzing how the expanded code sets will affect them, but small practices should not begin training until at least six months prior to implementation.

Now is the time to be aggressive and increase your marketing budget.

When engaging a collection agency or an attorney, first be certain that the accounts in question have been worked multiple times and are well over 180 days past due.

If you're looking to increase your patient base, there's a lot you and your staff can do to make first-timers feel welcome and ease their integration into your practice.

Physician practices in Massachusetts are deteriorating, due in part to state-mandated health coverage and an aging physician population, according to a recent report.

Lurking within the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are nearly $300 billion in potential tax breaks, and much of it is available to you.

If an area hospital has offered to help you purchase an electronic health record system, don't worry about missing out on the potential $44,000 incentive payment from the economic stimulus act.

Mystery patients can help solve the problems you didn't even know you had.

Replace the E&M documentation-based payment system with a system that rewards service and value, results in sparser and more useful documentation, and eliminates unnecessary complexity and burden.

All members of your staff should have rewards for meeting expectations as well as consequences for falling short.

A few months ago, our practice ran into some financial difficulties, and we tried to renegotiate our lease contract for our computers, but were rebuffed.

Is it safe to have my office staff pay my practice's bills online?

Codes 99441, 99442, and 99443 are used to report non-face-to-face evaluation and management services provided by a physician to a patient using the telephone.

Critical care is the total of care rendered by a physician within a calendar day and may be rendered by more than one physician.

More than half of all non-referred visits to specialists are for routine or preventive care that likely could have been managed by the patient's primary care physician, according to a recent study.

It appears that I would be exposed to potential liability claims if my locum tenens company terminated business because, in this event, there would be no tail policy.