Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Support Your Incident-to Claims or Face OIG Scrutiny This Year

Make certain your visit meets 4 criteria before filing an incident-to claim.

In case you don't know how to appropriately bill the services the non-physician practitioners (NPPs) in your office perform, it might cost you more than the 15 percent difference in reimbursement rates. Read this expert medical billing article and know what you require to keep you practice off the OIG hot list.

Reason: As part of its 2012 Work Plan, which came out last October, the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) plans to inspect incident to services.

Your best bet for evading OIG scrutiny is no to bill incident to lest you're assured you've met the requirements.

Know What Incident to Means

As most practices already know, under incident-to rules, qualified NPPs can treat definite patients and still bill the visit in the physician's National Provider Identifier (NPI), bringing in 100 percent of the assigned fee.

How it works: While an NPP provides a service to a Medicare patient incident-to the physician, you can report the service in the physician's NPI as long as all of the rules for incident-to services are taken care of. You will then charge the payer 100 percent of the service's fee.

Remember: In case you find the service does not meet incident-to medical billing requirements, you don't have to sacrifice payment completely in many cases. In case a Medicare credentialed NPP delivers the service, you can bill under his own NPI. In that case, you'll generally receive between 65 and 85 percent of the normal global fee found in the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, depending on the type of NPP.

Medical Billing Tip: In case a member of your auxiliary staff, for instance a medical assistant (MA), offers a service when there is no direct supervision, you cannot bill for the service.

Get to Know OIG's Plans

The OIG aims to decide whether payment for incident to services displayed a higher error rate than non-incident to services. Incident-to medical billing services denote a program vulnerability in that they do not appear in claims data and can be recognized only by reviewing the medical record. They may also be exposed to overutilization and expose Medicare beneficiaries to care that fails to meet professional standards of quality.

"Incident-to' medical Coding billing is always something being examined by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) simply by nature. The claims are sent in under the physician's name. The mid-level provider is ‘transparent' to this process. In case the carriers see more claims than usual coming in for the physician, that type of specialty, etc. they will wish to investigate to see if the patients are being seen suitably and thus being billed correctly.

A lot of the recent overpayment, audit, civil false claims act, and also criminal cases established by the federal and state agencies overseeing the Medicare and Medicaid programs include allegations of improper medical Billing for -- incident-toservices.

For further details on this and for other medical coding updates, sign up  http://www.supercoder.com/.


2 comments:

  1. As much as three quarters of hospital staff are usually burdened with some sort of billing-related work in a traditional billing system. Opting for electronic medical billing solutions (ones that come with free EMR plans) that fit easily into the healthcare business' workflow are key to freeing up staff resources.
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  2. Certified medical biller and coders in NH are paid higher than their non-certified colleagues too. As mentioned earlier, a non-certified worker with 6 years of rendered service make $36,000 a year. A certified worker with the same work experience is paid $42,000. That’s a difference of about $6,000 in a year. Those who have 15 years of work experience but are not certified billers and coders earn $45,000 annually while a certified employee gets $50,000. Medical Billing and Coding Salary in New Hampshire

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