Your chances of scoring up to $44,000 in per-provider electronic health record (EHR) bonuses could be a lot better with the help of a regional extension center (REC). A complete roster of 62 federally funded RECs have been assigned by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), giving every practice in the country the option to get REC help.

Look for a CMS letter warning you to obtain accreditation for advanced imaging services or forgo thousands of dollars in reimbursements in 2012. Then act fast; don't get caught in a crush of providers trying to earn accreditation before the Jan. 1, 2012, deadline.

For all the talk about price transparency in health care, many private payers still won't show you their fee schedules even when you're a participating physician practice. This puts you in a terrible position. Without the fee schedule, you don't know whether fees are adequate or whether to negotiate for additional payment. You also don't know how much you'll get paid each time you submit a claim - the amount can vary on different claims for the same service.

Your claims for high-level new patient visits could be delayed up to 60 days - the maximum period CMS allows - if a prepayment edit being instituted by Highmark Medicare Services spreads to other Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC) jurisdictions.

You're less than two months away from a 23% cut to your Medicare payments. And, you'll need to rely on a lame-duck session of Congress to fix the payment formula. The House and Senate members don't return until after mid-term elections in November.

Your E/M coding and any bonuses you earn via the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program will be subject to close scrutiny by the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) next year, according to its just-released 2011 work plan.

Use this table of all 62 regional extension centers (RECs) to find the one operating in your state. HHS officials have said it's up to practices to research their local REC and find out what services are being offered. Remember: A REC is a federally funded organizations being paid by the federal government to help a certain number of primary care providers implement electronic health record (EHR) systems and use those systems to achieve meaningful use.

Some staff members say we can charge an E/M visit prior to a screening colonoscopy if the physician needs to address a co-morbidity and adjust Coumadin, manage diabetes, etc. There seems to be a lot of different opinions. What does CMS state?

There are now three different groups that have government approval to certify electronic health record (EHR) systems for meaningful use. InfoGard Laboratories, an information technology firm that specializes in electronic security testing, got the green light from the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Sept. 17.

This chart examines the change in denial rates for 10 high-utilization services between 2008 and 2009, based on the latest CMS claims data from 2009. NOTE: Codes billed fewer than 1 million times annually were excluded from analysis. NOTE: To ensure a wide range of specialties were represented, several high-denial, high-utilization physical therapy codes were excluded, despite having higher denial rates than some of the codes shown.