Audits

You may be afraid of audits, but if you aren't auditing your own billing procedures, you're probably losing a fortune. Here's how.

The Office of Inspector General included "identical notes" as an area of interest in its 2011 Work Plan. Make sure your patient notes reflect each unique encounter.

Given the heightened scrutiny of the medical industry on a variety of medical practice related issues from billing to HIPAA compliance, it should come as no surprise that the IRS is looking at medical practices and their accounting methods more carefully than ever before.

Do you know what a good accountant should be doing for you and your practice? If you don't, you could be losing money and opportunity. Here's how to make sure everything adds up when it comes to your financial counsel.

Laptops are great. They provide incredible computing horsepower in a small and portable package. However, sometimes in the hands of certain players in healthcare, they can become a HIPAA security risk.

Once you know your practice is being evaluated by payers, monitor yourself using the same metrics to stay on top of your game.

The days of paying someone to merely fill out a return and figure out what you owe with no creative input as to how legally minimize that obligation are long gone. It’s also important to know that practices that have been long standing and allowed or overlooked, if not actually codified in the tax code, may need to be changed.

From HIPAA to STARK laws, legal issues continue to challenge and sometimes bewilder physicians' practices nationwide. While focusing on medicine, no doubt a few legal matters crossed your mind this year as patients came in and out of your office.

The future of the direct-pay practice model is bright. Here's how it works, the affect on patients, and where it fits with models promoted by healthcare reform.

The 1995 and 1997 CMS guidelines for E&M services are still topical.

The Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) program is picking up steam, and practices should be prepared for an appeals process. Healthcare attorney Andrew Wachler walks through what you need to know about the appeals process.

In her MGMA session on the internal checks and balances practices should implement to prevent fraud and embezzlement, Susan F. Childs noted that 75 percent of businesses have a risk of theft or embezzlement. Is your practice at risk? Find out how to assess your practice procedures and prevent theft in your practice.

Mainstream EHR vendors have gotten better at catering to physicians in specialties outside of primary care, but don't count out niche EHR vendors. We help you examine your purchasing options.

The Physicians Practice team will be covering the 2010 MGMA Annual Conference in the Big Easy October 24 through October 27. We'll be posting podcasts, videos, and articles, all keeping you up-to-date on the latest sessions, speakers, news, and practice management advice.

In this issue, a question that asks how many new codes are in the ICD-10 code set.

Here are some simple things you can do to help boost your revenue.

A brief explanation of the patient's background, condition, and prognosis might be sufficient to document an encounter, an EHR note will go on for screen after screen of redundant text. As a result, it's difficult to spot the important points in an EHR-generated note. That's a problem, not only for physicians looking over their own notes, but also for communications between referring physicians and consultants.

Chances are you are going to get audited in the next few years. But don’t panic - use our audit guide to get your practice prepared instead.

Here’s how to use these code add-ons correctly to help you get paid what you deserve

Advance preparation is your key to successfully managing the ICD-10 conversion. Here’s what your practice needs to know and do to get ready.

The benefit of having your own in-house billing department is that they are well-versed in billing procedures for your practice and specialty.

Expert Judy Capko explains why it’s crucial to designate someone in your practice the captain of your coding team.

While I still love the mental challenges of navigating the endocrine system, I have to admit there are many days that I ask myself why I do what I do. Between the non-medical part of medicine - the patients who think they are sick but aren’t, the prior auths, the record audits, the denial of payments, the phone calls, the faxes, and so on - there’s barely any time to be a “real” doctor.

Medicare is getting more aggressive with audits through its Recovery Audit Contractor program. Here’s how to assess your billing procedures to avoid audits, and establish a process for when a RAC does come knocking.

Here's a primer to assist your medical practice maintain its patient records and avoid any legal troubles.

Coding is hard. It’s tedious. Yet it is how you get paid for the services you perform. So we asked the experts where things go wrong most of the time - and how to fix them.

It is important to take the time to review the rules with your staff, so that everyone understands exactly what incident-to billing requires.

The benefit of having your own in-house billing department is that they are well-versed in billing procedures for your practice and speciality.

Concerned about Medicare’s new Recovery Audit Contractors snooping around? Though your practice may not be affected by RACs for at least a year, the time to ready your defenses is now. Here’s how.