Many patients are panicked that their physician will stop seeing Medicare patients, and that is not without cause. Physicians that care for Medicare patients do so at a loss to their practice which they can only hope to make up for from other payers. As money gets tighter and tighter, physicians are forced to decide if they can continue to see any patient at a loss.
Although a number of surveys indicate that few Medicare patients (less than 18% nationally) have difficulty finding primary care physicians, much has been written criticizing the methodology of these surveys. A survey in North Carolina in August 2012 revealed that of 200 family physicians called by “mystery shoppers”, only 100 offices indicated they accept new Medicare patients.
Here are 10 reasons why physicians might consider not seeing new Medicare patients, not participating with Medicare or opting completely out of the Medicare program.
#1: Medicare does not pay enough to cover the expenses associated with the services provided.
Mary Pat and I had the pleasure recently of being introduced to Ron De Santo and his team at SelectOrtho DME. We are always excited to hear about new products and services bringing win-win solutions to physician practices and patients. SelectOrtho’s turnkey solution for in-office brace fitting is a way for the physician practice to add ancillary services while providing quality service to patients. As a changeup from our regular “10 Question” format, we thought it might be fun to do a video interview and Ron De Santo graciously agreed.
Mary Pat’s Interview with Ron De Santo of SelectOrtho DME Part 1 of 2
Click below for the second part of the interview!
The deadline is fast approaching for both individual eligible professionals (EPs) and group practices participating in the Group Practice Reporting Option (GPRO) to complete their required number of electronic prescriptions. If you are an EP or an eRx GPRO participant, you must successfully report as an electronic prescriber before June 30, 2013 or you will experience a payment adjustment in 2014 for professional services covered under Medicare Part B’s Physician Fee Schedule (PFS.)
The only thing better than finding a great report, tool, or piece of information on the web is sharing it with our readers so that they can put it to work themselves. Here are some of the “treasures” that I’ve been pointed towards recently that have found places in my bookmarks folder. We hope you’ll find them useful too!
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Disclosure: We use and believe in Box at Manage My Practice and we are Certified Box Resellers. More information here.
Box, a California cloud file sharing and content management service has announced new partners and investments in the healthcare industry. Makers of software for clinical documentation, care coordination, interoperability and access to care will integrate tightly with Box’s existing platform to make sharing data from their software even easier. The platform partners announced were: EHR DrChrono, dental PM systemUmbie Dentalcare, secure messaging apps TigerText and Medigram, provider social network Doximity, telehealth platform Healthtap, image viewers iMedViewer and iPaxera, record release app Medi-Copy and finally posture analysis app Posture Screen Mobile. In addition to announcing the new platform partners, Box also announced an early-seed investment in DrChrono to help the software make medical data viewable in Box. Box also added former Google Health director Missy Krasner to help their push into healthcare. Krasner sees her work with Box as “picking up where Google Health left off“.
NOTE: CMS has just added additional presentations of the webinar below – please check the end of the article for added dates. MPW
What is PQRS?
Our recent webinar on EHR Compliance was a big hit and we’ve had lots of requests for the slides, so we decided to make them available to everyone.
Information for patients about drug disposal is a great item to post to your practice website, and for you to use for your own practice medications (samples or otherwise) that are outdated or unusable.
Thanks to HelloHealth for sponsoring
“Adding to Your Compliance Toolbelt: Fraud Prevention in Your EHR/Clinical Documentation”
Recent changes to the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have brought stiffer penalties for fraud prevention, with new levels of enforcement among smaller and independent medical practices. Electronic medical record users should be aware of issues that pertain to electronic documentation compliance, including patient identification and demographic accuracy; and documentation, auditing and authorship integrity. This webinar reviews these and other concepts, including: (more…)
At Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, doctors are saving time and sharing ideas using Box, a file-sharing and collaboration software that lets providers browse available medical documents and communicate with each other about treatment options. We are big believers in Box at Manage My Practice – we use it, and most of our clients end up using it too. Box is the only HIPAA-compliant file storage and collaboration service, and just like the doctors at Wake Forest, it makes our lives easier countless times a day. Wake Forest uses Box to store all of their medical journals and articles, as well as commenting on each file so that physicians can discussproceduresand treatment options. The doctors can access the repository from their tablets and smartphones, so that accessing detailed disease or treatment information is always as close as their mobile device.
Box is a simple and secure solution for sharing content with your coworkers, customers and audience. If you have moved your organizations’s practice management, electronic health record or email service to “the cloud” then it only makes sense to move your paperwork and content out of boxes and storage and into the cloud as well. If you have are using email attachments, a network drive, FTP server, or a non-compliant solution like Dropbox, then switching to Box can help your practice reduce your liability, stay HIPAA compliant, and store all of your digital content in a secure and accessible manner.
Box also makes mobilizing your workforce across locations easy. Box means your content is always available in a web browser, a phone or tablet, or synced on your desktop. Many of our consulting clients also use it to coordinate work and file across locations. If you have outsourced your billing or human resources, a shared folder in Box allows both locations to have the latest information and stay in touch.
Manage My Practice is a Certified Box Reseller, and would love to help you leverage Box to improve your practice’s workflow.
