Posts Tagged best practices

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Advance Beneficiary Notice FAQs

The advance beneficiary notice (ABN) is a powerful tool for practices to educate patients about their benefits and responsibilities for Medicare non-covered services. Many of our readers still write us to ask questions about the form and the correct way to use it in the office, so we developed this Frequently Asked Questions list for the ABN to clear up some of the confusion.

We always tell the physicians we work with: “If you are going to accept insurance, you need to be the expert on insurance.” In practice this means knowing your patient’s benefits and working with them to communicate with them about what, if anything, they will owe before or after payer adjudication. No one enjoys being surprised about money!

The ABN is also a tremendous opportunity to talk about financial responsibilities with a patient. If you don’t have a credit card on file program in your practice, it’s important to be proactive about patient financial responsibilities and how they will be handled. Having a patient sign that they understand they will be financially responsible for payment for a non-covered service is a natural way to start that process.

Here are some of your most frequently asked ABN questions.

What is the ABN? What does it do?

The ABN was originally developed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to make sure Medicare patients were aware that if they received services that were not covered by Medicare, payment for these services would be their responsibility. By signing the ABN, the patient agrees that if Medicare (or other payer) does not pay the physician then the patient will have to pay for it. The document affirms that the patient knows they could be required to pay out of pocket. Once the ABN is signed, if you are sure Medicare won’t pay you can (and probably should) collect the patient portion listed on the form immediately. You can charge in full for the services if the ABN is signed, however the service is self-pay at that point, so I always suggest you charge your self-pay rate.

What won’t Medicare pay for?

The classic example is an annual physical, which many people assume is part of their Medicare coverage. Medicare will pay for an initial “Welcome to Medicare” visit, as well as an “Annual Wellness” visit, but the key word to hear is “visit”. These are not physical examinations. If a patient wants a physical, they will need to sign an ABN before the service saying they understand that Medicare will not pay for it. Other things that Medicare will not pay for include services without specific medical need, like labs or imaging diagnostics without diagnoses that are accepted as medically necessary. Medicare will also only pay for certain services at regular intervals, for example women who are considered “low risk” for cervical cancer can only receive a pap smear every 24 months. Note that you are not required by Medicare to get an ABN signed for services that are never covered, such as the annual physical, however, it pays to be absolutely clear when discussing payments, so I suggest you get an ABN signed by the patient regardless.

Should we just have everybody sign an ABN?

No. The ABN is to be used in specific instances for a specific service. You cannot require a patient to sign a “blanket” ABN for the year, just in case. If Mr. Smith wants a service that Medicare is unlikely to, or definitely will not pay for and the physician is comfortable ordering or performing the service, a staff member should present an ABN to Mr. Smith for that specific day’s procedure, before it is performed. If the patient is a having a series of recurring services that will not be covered, you can have one ABN signed for up to twelve months of the specific service. An example of this might be a series of physical therapy sessions.  The ABN is not a catch- all to protect from denial, however, and persistent misuse will not only be denied, but could open the door to an audit.

We are a small, busy practice; that sounds like a lot of work!

It is a lot of work for a practice! Many practices choose to not use the ABN rather then work out a protocol to implement it. The practice has to have a system in place so that the physician or staff member can explain the situation, fill out the form, answer the patient’s questions and file the ABN for posterity (they have to be kept seven years, like other records). It can be the physician in a micropractice, or a dedicated billing or customer service employee in a larger setting. Also, a note has to be made of the ABN signing in the patient’s chart so that modifiers can be added to the CPT codes for billing.

Are ABNs for Medicare only?

No. You can also have a patient sign an ABN for a private payer. This helps the patient to understand that if their insurance doesn’t cover the service specified, the patient will have to pay for it.  Medicare requires an ABN be signed in order to bill the patient, but for patients with private insurance it’s still a great opportunity to talk about non-covered services, deductibles, copays, coinsurance or any past balances if you haven’t already. A few private payers actually require a waiver/ABN to bill patients for non-covered services – check your contract to be sure.

 

Mary Pat has created a generic non-Medicare ABN; if you’d like a copy for $20, just email Mary Pat and she can send you one.

Posted in: Amazing Customer Service, Collections, Billing & Coding, Compliance, Day-to-Day Operations, Finance, Medicare & Reimbursement

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Natural Language Processing, First Steps Towards Telehealth, and a Single App to Read any EHR in another edition of Manage My Practice’s 2.0 Tuesday!

As managers, providers and employees, we always have to be looking ahead at how the technology on our horizon will affect how our organizations administer health care. In the spirit of looking forward to the future, we present “2.0 Tuesday”, a  feature on Manage My Practice about how technology is impacting our practices, and our patient and population outcomes.

We hope you enjoy looking ahead with us, and share your ideas, reactions and comments below!

  • Natural Language Processing Advances Allow for Improved Insight into Public Health

Writing for KevinMD, Jaan Sidorov, author of the Disease Management Care Blog highlights several examples of how Natural Language Processing- the idea of teaching computer programs to understand the relationship between words in human speech (teaching them to not just hear us, but understand us- like Watson understood the clues on Jeopardy) is being be applied to the Electronic Health Record to predict and prepare for public health trends, as well as to correct mistakes present in the electronic record due to human error. Recent developments like the CDC’s Biosense program allow public health officials at local, state and federal levels to monitor big picture trends in public health by the words and diagnoses reported in medical documentation- keeping an ear on health trends, by “listening” to data about reported health incidents.

  • 10 Best Practices for Implementing Telemedicine in Hospitals

Sabrina Rodak at Becker Orthopedic, Spine and Pain Management has put together a fantastic list of the steps and assessments involved in implementing a telemedicine program in a hospital setting. Although written with Orthopods in mind, the questions that need to be answered, and the steps that need to be taken to develop a strong, lasting program are similar across many different programs and specialties. With so much excitement in the field, it is very nice to see someone talk about the process of taking these technologies from drawing board excitement to nuts-and-bolts execution.

(via FierceHealthIT)

  • San Diego Health System Seeks to Develop Single App to Access Any EMR

Presenting at a Toronto Mobile Healthcare Summit Last Week, Dr. Benjamin Kanter, CIO of Palomar Pomerado Health presented the two-hospital system’s plans to develop their own native mobile application to view as many different Electronic Medical Records as possible from a single mobile interface. In other words, this fairly small health system, who has only devoted three employees to the project, is taking on one of the biggest, and toughest challenges in HIT by simply saying “We can do it ourselves!”, and from some of the reactions from the conference attendees who saw the presentation, they are off to quite a strong start. The first version of the program should launch for Android in March, and the system already has a deal in place with vendor Cerner to access their systems. Stay tuned!

(via ITWorldCanada)

 

Be sure to check back soon for another 2.0 Tuesday!

 

 

 

 

Posted in: 2.0 Tuesday, Electronic Medical Records

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Digging Into the Details of “Certified EMR” & Tips For Buying an EMR

Steps to digging under the meaning of EMR certification: 

Cocker Spaniel digging

Image via Wikipedia

  1. Click to see the most recent alphabetical list (by product name not company) of all products certified here.
  2. Find the company or companies you are using or are considering using.
  3. Check that the exact name of the product is what you have or might purchase.
  4. Check to find out if a module or part of the product is certified or if the complete product is certified.
  5. Check to make sure the version of the product is the version you have or will have.

If you have questions about each company’s exact criteria met, you are in luck!  On the ONC site here, you can click on each company’s detail (“View Criteria”) on the far right column labeled “Certification Status” to see what they have and don’t have.  Compare this to how you are anticipating using your EMR to meet meaningful use.  The more check marks a company has, the better-equipped they are (and more flexible) to meet your practice needs and to qualify for the stimulus money.

The ONC site with the Certified Health IT Product List (CHPL) is Version 1.0.  Version 2.0 is now being developed and will provide the Clinical Quality Measures each product was tested on, and the capability to query and sort the data for viewing. The next version will also provide the reporting number that will be accepted by CMS for purposes of attestation under the EHR (“meaningful use”) incentives programs.

You can tell ONC what you think would be helpful in the new version by emailing your ideas to ONC.certification@hhs.gov, with “CHPL” in the subject line.

If you’d like a list of just outpatient/medical practice EMR products or just inpatient / hospital products, I’ve split the big list into two smaller printable lists here:

Medical Practice / Outpatient

Hospital / Outpatient

Tips On Buying An EMR

To-do list book.

Remember that meeting meaningful use does not tell the whole story – if you are shopping for an EMR be prepared to go beyond a product’s certification status to consider:

  • Flexibility – does it make the practice conform to it or can it conform to the practice? How?
  • Templates and best practices – are you starting from scratch in developing protocols, templates and cheat sheets for your practice, or does it have a storehouse of examples to choose from or tweak?
  • Built for the physician, or the billing office, or the nurses, but doesn’t really meet the needs of all three? Make sure the functionality is not too skewed to one user group, but if it is, it should be somewhat skewed to the provider.
  • Interface and integration with your practice management system. Does the information flow both ways? Do you ever have to re-enter information because one side doesn’t speak to the other?
  • Interface with other inside and outside systems: Labs, imaging, hospital systems, ambulatory surgical center systems?
  • Built-in Resources: annual upgrade of HCPCS and ICD codes, drug compendium (Epocrates), comparative effectiveness prompting?
  • Mobile applications – EMR on your providers’ phones?
  • Data entry systems – laptops, notebooks, tablets, iPads, smartphones, voice recognition?
  • Hosting – in your office? at the hospital? at the vendor’s data center? in the cloud of your choice?
  • What’s the plan for ICD-10? Will they provide practice support and education for the change or will they just change the number of characters in the diagnosis code field?
  • Price, including annual maintenance and additional costs for training, implementation, on-site support during go-live, and additional licenses for providers or staff.

Posted in: Electronic Medical Records, Headlines, Medicare & Reimbursement

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