You'll only need to furnish patients with a list of five alternative suppliers within a 25-mile radius for advanced imaging services you furnish in your office in order to comply with the new disclosure requirements finalized by CMS in the 2011 Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule. The agency initially wanted you to list a minimum of 10 (PBN 7/5/10).

Denial rates for most specialties don't change significantly depending on whether their services were rendered in the office or outpatient hospital setting. This chart shows how specialty-specific denial rates compare to the average or baseline denial rates for the office and outpatient hospital settings in 2008 and 2009.

Last week, we told you about high deductible health plans (HDHPs) and how they put your practice at risk for potentially being stuck trying to collect high patient balances after you've already provided the services(PBN 11/1/10). If you haven't dealt with HDHPs yet, you will soon. Here are eight tips to make sure you get the money you deserve for providing the services.

You know from experience that the biggest E/M code of all is 99213 (office/outpatient visit, est., $66.74) - but that's only in terms of utilization, a Part B News analysis shows.

You and your peers bill mid-level E/M code 99213 (office/outpatient visit, est., $66.74) more than any other E/M service, a trend visible in every year of CMS claims data dating back to 2000. But even while higher-level codes 99214 and 99215 have slowly grown over the last four years, the tendency to undercode 99213 remains strong - and financially costly.

Republicans made big gains in Congress on Election Day Nov. 2, but passing a multi-billion dollar Medicare payment fix bill will still be the responsibility of Democrats in power. You're just over two weeks away from a 23% cut to your Medicare reimbursements on Dec. 1 (PBN 10/11/10). After that, payment rates are scheduled to drop another 7% on Jan. 1.

Your practice can still tap into a major source of new revenue in 2011 via Medicare's new annual wellness visits, but your physicians must now offer to provide end-of-life planning as part of the service, according to the 2011 Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) final rule. To be clear: This new component, dubbed "voluntary advance care planning" in the final rule, is voluntary in that patients may refuse to have it included in their annual wellness visit (AWV).

You're counting on a Democratic Congress, dozens of members of which were just swept out of office over public anxiety about health care reform, to step in and save the day after CMS's 2011 Final Physician Fee Schedule produced an expected 30% cut to your payments set to take effect Jan. 1.

CMS released the finalized 2011 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule on Nov. 2, leaving you with little time to read and analyze all the contents of the 2,023-page rule. Here is Part B News' in-depth analysis of what changes CMS decided to go forward with in 2011. Part B News will have more coverage of the final rule in future issues of the newsletter and at www.partbnews.com.