How are you dealing with this year's flu season?

Many medical practices take a lot of precautionary steps to ensure that they collect from patients prior to rendering services. However, one factor in a patient's policy is as unpredictable as the weather, the patient's annual out of pocket. This part of the patient's policy is as confusing as politics, so much so that not even the insurance plan themselves can you help you when attempting to estimate what to collect ahead of time from the patient. For this reason, it is paramount that a solid patient receivables plan of action be discussed between Doctor, management and office personnel. At the end of the day, ignoring patient receivables will not make them go away, and practically giving a collection agency free money is a disservice to your practice and yourself.

One way to protect your practice from ever increasing patient receivables as well as to help your practice overhead by saving in fees paid to a collection agency, is to provide all your patients with a clear Financial Policy as well as a Credit Card Authorization Form that will be kept secure with the patient's credit card information. This form will of course specify to the patient under which circumstances this credit card will be used. However, prior to implementing such a policy is it imperative that this new policy be carefully executed. Ensuring that only key employees have access to this information or having all employees sign confidentiality agreements is one way to protect yourself. Also, all staff members that deal with patient scheduling and/or coordination need to be properly trained on how this new policy will be enforced.



Implementing this policy has many advantageous results, such as saving on postage, reduced days outstanding of patient balances, etc., however, it also has very serious repercussions if not properly executed. If you need to help on successfully executing this policy in your practice KabriniMed Group, Corp. can help. We can be contacted at KabriniGroup@gmail.com for more information.

Many changes either taking effect in 2013 or requiring preparation in 2013 for implementation in 2014 can have a huge financial impact on the health of your practice. Are you ready? This is the time to take stock of the resources you already have and those which you will need to consider.

Medicaid Reimbursement

With a new influx of lives being added to the Medicaid pool of patients, many PCP and Internists are going to see a large increase of new patients. So in order to compensate physicians for the new workload, fees for evaluation and management services as well as immunization services will be increased to 100% of Medicare allowables for 2013 and 2014.

Supply and Demand

With more patients being added to our system, due to the individual mandate and the increase of Medicaid qualified individuals, some physicians will see a heavier load of patients in their practice. Adding the fact that many of these patients are new to the system and therefore will require more work, practices need to have a plan in place as to how they will be adapting.

OIG 2013 Work Plan

The OIG will be taking a close look at claims from 2002 to 2011 billed with G modifiers (GA, GY, GX and GZ) to determine erroneous payments issued to physicians. These modifiers are used by practice when submitting claims to Medicare, indicating that a denial is expected for these services. However, in a review performed by the OIG, they found that a significant amount of claims submitted with these modifiers were paid in error. There is potentially $4 million of erroneous payments.

ICD-10

What was to be an effective date of October 1, 2013 has now been extended to October 1, 2014. However, practices will need start preparing for the changes soon or at least have an implementation plan in place. Many practices will wait until the last minute to start the planning and preparation because the deadline may once again be extended. However, with the complexity of the new coding system, there are certain areas that your practice may want to consider preparing, to aid in a smoother transition.

So what do these four issues have in common? They all have a potential to impact your practice financially. Too often medical practices choose to ignore changes to the until it is too late. The time to prepare your practice is now.