Audits

While there is little guidance on avoiding Qui Tam actions, here are some recommendations to help medical practices.

Here are some important qualifying questions physicians should ask before they commit to a captive insurance product.

Make sure your practice complies with HIPAA when staff and physicians want to view their own medical records.

CMS is stepping up efforts to ferret out fraud through its new Center for Program Integrity. Here's what your practice can do to stay below its radar.

What's worse than getting an audit notice in the mail? Getting two of them. Here's how I'm preparing for my practice's review.

My experience as an OB patient in Pakistan

The government is getting more aggressive-a lot more aggressive-in going after possible fraud. Here's how to keep your practice out of legal hot water.

Before you are caught with your HIPAA pants down, I recommend you take the following steps to plan for a smooth audit.

If you rated your top 10 day-to-day medical practice concerns, what would make the cut? Malpractice certainly would. Fraud and abuse compliance probably would not.

It is always safer and more cost-effective to make sure contracts and business arrangements are established correctly from the start.

You've heard all the guidance about the importance of good patient relations and documentation as a way to avoid a malpractice suit. But now, you think you may have a problem. Here's what to do.

The next 60 days marks the final push to sell physicians across the United States tax plans of both good and questionable value.

These days, everything from EHRs to PM systems are available via cloud computing. Is it time to ditch the servers and join the movement?

It’s important to make sure you know who is asking for charts and the reason for audit before shipping off requested documents.

Sometimes better planning and support can resolve poor recordkeeping by physicians. But if the situation becomes intolerable, tough decisions must be made.

Expansion of your medical practice across state lines creates a multitude of issues which physicians often do not realize until it is too late.

The increasing aggressiveness of Medicare's so-called recovery audit contractors (RACs) is making it ever more vital that practices have formal coding compliance programs in place.

Adding ancillary services can be a great way to better service your patients and increase practice income. But do it the right way.

Want to keep more of what you earned this year? Here are some basic tips to get you thinking now about the end of the calendar year.

One way the federal government is raising revenue is by more strictly enforcing existing tax codes and by hiring a vast number of new revenue agents to take a hard look at many of the issues that are commonly ignored. An example of this is the gift tax.

A visit from the authorities does not necessarily mean that you have been or will be accused of anything improper, but it can hurt your reputation and your business.

Here's my prediction: your practice will be audited in the next 24 months and asked to return overpayments.

In my experience, it’s often the staff that has been with the practice the longest, and on whom the practice most relies, who pose the greatest threat.

Are you managing your personal and practice business affairs like a wellness clinic or a trauma center?

In this blog, we continue to examine the tactical application of insurance and how physicians should think about it as part of their investment and estate-planning portfolio.

The HITECH Act significantly strengthened aspects of the HIPAA Security Rule. If you are a 'Covered Entity' or 'Business Associate' it's time to get serious!

The feds have aggressively stepped up their fraud and abuse efforts. Your practice may play by the rules, but that doesn't guarantee it will escape federal scrutiny.

How can I avoid an audit finding of "insufficient documentation" for medical decision making?

Are electronic records really more risky than paper records? They certainly can be, if proper data and network security procedures aren’t designed and implemented.

To stay safe and weed out the billing and collections problems stifling your practice's revenue stream, our experts recommend a "bottom-to-top" assessment of your entire billing operation.