Well, we made it! 2020 is in the rear-view mirror and we’re barreling into 2021 at high speed! Is it time to set cruise control and relax yet? Not even close! At the time of writing, the vaccines have been delivered and have started being administered, which is an amazing accomplishment in and of itself. I understand that politics has infiltrated much of our daily lives and that the vaccine itself is polarizing, but again, we cannot diminish this amazing accomplishment and the effect it will have for our front-line staff and those who are vulnerable in our community. People are hurting in our community in many different ways and helping them should be a major priority for all of us.
As we move into 2021, we’ve got some exciting things happening! In this issue, we’re so pleased to welcome CMS Administrator, Seema Verma, in an interview conducted by Sean Weiss, Scott Kraft, and Grant Huang from DoctorsManagement. We’re thrilled with the article and hope you enjoy reading it too. In addition to that, we have updates to the E/M coding in Tim McNamara from AcumenMD’s article; a great article by Betty Hovey on the new regulatory changes that may help expand telehealth usage moving forward; Amy Wagner has written about using CPT code 97002 to capture practice expense factors; the PAHCOM National Board has continued their Back to Basics series with this one focusing on problem resolution; and of course, we welcome Rachel Rose, J.D., MBA, with her article on the final rules on the false claim cases—among many more. David Jakielo writes about things never being the same again and provides some great insight into the future, post-COVID-19, and we spend 5 minutes with Scott Kraft from DoctorsManagement.
Also, I wanted to let you all know that we listened to those of you who took the time to call us about the CEU certificate printing issues. We have now fixed it so that all certificates come in a PDF format so you can save and/or print easier to submit to your associations for proof of completion. We hope that helps.
BTW – We need to issue a correction for the article, “2021 E/M Changes: Are You Ready?” in issue 15.6-November/December 2020. On page 12 and 13, under the Coding by Medical Decision Making section, the codes in the New Patient and Established Patient were reversed. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused our subscribers and the author, Betty Hovey, CCS-P, CDIP, CPC, COC, CPMA, CPCD, CPB, CPC-I.
So, let’s all wave goodbye to 2020 and move into 2021 with a positive outlook. And if you can’t, fake it until you make it!
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