Increasing Collections: Through the Reductions of Bad Patient Behavior
Collections is both an art and a science that when performed in conjunction lead to positive outcomes. Practices without doubt continue to struggle both in dealing with payers and with their patients. However, there are steps to be considered and imp...
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Accounting and Finance for Non-Financial Managers: Build a Solid Practice in 2012
After college I swore I would never look at another accounting book, spreadsheet, or anything that had to do with numbers. During the last 15 years, like many, I tried to carry out the promise that I made about avoiding numbers and formulas but no ma...
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How to Perform a Practice Compliance Audit: Tips and Strategies from the Inside
It should always be the desire of practice leaders to demonstrate "Good Faith" efforts towards complying with federal, state, and payer specific requirements for coding and documentation. Thinking you can glide under the radar is not and has not been...
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When to Hire a Consultant
By: Sean Weiss, CPC, CPC-P, CCP-P Consultants can be a blessing and a curse depending on who you ask. For the past 18 years I have been working with physician groups of all sizes and specialties helping to uncover lost revenues as well as identify...
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The Time for Change is Now: Things Will Only Get Worse
For years I have written for BC Advantage about the coding, compliance and practice management issues always sensitive to my readers but recently it am finding it hard to remain quiet about the state of the industry. I have always found myself on the...
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Medical Decision Making (MDM) has been a bone of contention for as long as I have been in this industry, which judging by my newly identified gray hair is a very long time. Evaluation and Management Services (E&M) continue to be on top of the list...
Financial Crisis In Health Care
It has been some time since I have been able to write for my favorite publication, BC Advantage. During the last year I have had to depend on the very physicians I serve as a compliance officer and consultant for to take care of me. It was a very fri...
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Health Care Reform
Health care has often been seen as a recession proof industry. However, times are changing and I am afraid not for the better. The government is in trouble and there are no two ways about it. When Democrats and Republican both send out the same messa...
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Recovery Audit Contractors - YOU CAN WIN
As if physicians and health care professionals did not already have enough to worry about, now there is a new threat! Much like the Swine Flu, RACs cause fever, muscle weakness and sore throat from all of the screaming done when you received one of t...
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Stark Clarifications
Recently there have been new releases and clarifications to the Stark regulations. There are so many aspects to these regulations there is no possible way we can evaluate each in this article so we have decided to identify the most pressing issues in...
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Recovery Audit Contractors (RACs): Current Status and The Future
During the past 3 years a demonstration project that was put in place as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 section 306 directed the Department of Health and Human Services to begin the process of using Recovery Audit Contractors in an ef...
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What to do When You Are Wrong
Every practice makes mistakes; after all we are all human. I have been writing for BC Advantage now for almost 4 years and I have had the privilege to get to know a lot of the readers personally. As most of you know, I have been working in healthcare...
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Incident-To: The Rules Just Got Tougher
Incident-To billing provisions just got a bit more difficult to bill for. Pub. 100-02 Medicare Benefit Policy, Transmittal 87, which was released on May 2, 2008 and became effective on June 2, 2008 places further restrictions and requirements on prov...
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Death: How To Code It
Talking about death is never pleasant, however in the health care industry it is a cold reality we cannot avoid. Robert Half once said, "Death is the penalty we all pay for the privilege of life." Dating back to the mid 1990's when I was a Senior Con...
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NPP Question
I read all your articles on "Split/Shared Visits and I use it as a guide. I have a question if an NPP helped gather information along with the physician and the physician tells the NPP what to dictate, can the NPP act as a scribe and dictate the con...
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