The idea of a “surprise bill” – a bill that contains costs the patient didn’t expect or necessarily know about before treatment – has been around for decades. Now, though, legislatures and regulators at the state and federal level have begun to take action against surprise billing to protect consumers. Here’s how it usually works: […]
Compliance, for an anesthesia practice, is quite different from other medical practices and specialties – and can even differ within the anesthesia field. Because so much depends on proper compliance, practices need to understand what is required of them when it comes to complying with rigorous documentation requirements. However, many providers – even those with […]
For anesthesia practices participating in the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) from CMS, there are four ways to take part: claims, qualified registries, electronic health records (EHR), and a fourth option known as qualified clinical data registries (QCDRs). Most providers utilize one of the first three methods to submit data to CMS. However, there is […]
There’s one thing that every medical practice has in common: in order to make it, you have to get paid. If getting paid were easy, though, practices wouldn’t have revenue problems. The truth is, these problems do exist because getting paid is a challenge – to the point that a recent survey of practice owners […]
Earlier this year, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS) announced its latest payment program: the Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) model. Set to start at the beginning of 2017, CPC+ is a payment model that will give a monthly payment to providers to manage care for patients, in an effort to create more […]
In 2015, Congress passed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, known as MACRA. Since then, regulators have been working on releasing guidelines and programs governing MACRA, and many of these impact anesthesiologists. Parts of the proposed rule (it hasn’t gone into effect yet) were announced on April 27 and discussed on this blog previously, […]
Do you know how well your anesthesia practice is performing? Providers think they know the answer to this question, but when they really drill down to figure out exactly how well their practices are performing, they often find themselves struggling to come up with an answer. After all, there is a sliding scale of “well.” […]
Choosing anesthesia billing companies to handle coding, billing, provider credentialing, and revenue cycle management for your practice is a wise choice because you can lower costs, increase efficiency, improve patient service, reduce claim denial rates, boost revenue, reduce overhead, and avoid penalties from not complying with regulations. With all the different providers out there, selecting […]
For years, experts have extolled the virtues of going paperless for a medical practice. Paperless saves the environment, is more convenient, and saves time and man-hours – or so the story goes. While these are definitely true benefits, the prospect of going completely paperless has been so daunting that few practices have accomplished it. Indeed, […]
Few things are more frustrating to a practice than having a claim denied by a payer. Denied claims result in delayed payments at best, and no payment at all at worst. Many practices don't know why certain claims are denied, or why their claim denial rate is as high as it is. Fortunately, practices can […]
