Weed out any potential electronic health records (EHR) meaningful use attestation issues now, in the final days before the 90-day reporting period begins on Oct. 1, to ensure you receive your $18,000 bonus without any hiccups. A host of problems can arise during the 90 days while others can be solved with staff training and workflow shuffling.

Your coders will have to get familiar with nearly 250,000 new code pairs – a hundred times more than were released in the third quarter – in CMS’ latest National Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) edits effective Oct. 1. The majority of added edit pairs have been related to general surgery and trigger point injections. Plus, all edit pairs, except for Category III pairs, were coupled with wound repair codes.

Your private pay rates change at least every year without the same consistency and reliability that comes with Medicare’s annual fee schedule. And if you’re not keeping track, you’re losing money. Keep more revenue by monitoring your private payer reimbursements and maintaining your own fee schedules for all payers.

This chart shows the Medicare services with the highest improper payment rates along with the percentage of overall Medicare fee-for-service improper payments that service’s improper payments represent. The data, which come from CMS’ 2011 Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) report released in August, include both underpayments and overpayments, although the majority were overpayments.

How do you correctly code Procrit (Epoetin alpha) for patients who don’t have end stage renal disease (ESRD)? Does the coding differ if the facility is a federally qualified health clinic?