What do ICD-10 and E&M coding have in common? The answer is documentation. Appropriate physician documentation matters more today than perhaps ever before - not just because of audits, but also because of the looming conversion to ICD-10. Many practices fall down here and needlessly expose themselves to risks, financial and legal. Make sure you are doing it right.

Plan to attend this interactive training session specifically geared for physicians and their practice teams and taught by the recognized physician documentation experts at Physician Reimbursement Systems. The session will be held Tuesday, Sept. 24, 6-8:30 p.m. MDT at the Colorado Medical Society building in Denver. Learn how you can code better, get paid and still sleep at night.

Click here for more information and to register.

In accordance with the health reform law, all new and existing providers for beneficiaries of Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Programs must be reevaluated under new screening guidelines. The so-called revalidation effort applies to providers and suppliers enrolled prior to March 25, 2011.

Novitas Solutions, the Medicare Administrative Contractor for Colorado, will send revalidation notices on a regular basis to all affected providers and suppliers. They recently released an updated revalidation request mailing schedule. Click here to view the full schedule. Note that the first mailing to roughly 7,000 providers and suppliers will now be issued on Sept. 20, 2013.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will publish the listing of providers and suppliers included in this mailing on their website on or around Oct. 31, 2013, approximately three to four weeks after all contractors have provided their mailing information for the month of September.

Questions about the revalidation initiative? Click here to visit Novitas' Enrollment Center.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wants to know how satisfied physicians are with their Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC). To gather this information, the federal CMS is asking physicians or physician office staff to complete a form indicating interest in completing the MAC Satisfaction Indicator (MSI).

The MSI is a questionnaire that asks about your satisfaction with specific services your MAC provides you, such as claims processing, Medicare enrollment, educational opportunities and responsiveness to inquiries.

The federal CMS first needs interested providers to complete the MSI Participant Registration form. The form itself is not a survey; it is a method for gathering pertinent contact information such as name, e-mail address, state, etc. This form should take less than one minute to complete. For each MSI administration, CMS will randomly select an MSI sample from a list of providers who register to become participants.

If you are a Medicare FFS provider, or work on behalf of a Medicare FFS provider (such as a billing agency), and are interested in participating, please take a moment to register your contact information by completing the form. Don't miss this opportunity. Click here to register.

The American Medical Association aims to move the health care system to real-time adjudication or estimation at the time of service to eliminate the need for patient invoicing and related follow-up communications, as it allows practices to reconcile patient accounts prior to the patient leaving the office. In order to reduce the most administrative burden, the goal would be 0% of claims paid after 30 days. A practice would typically incur rework costs when it pulls an accounts receivable report for claims paid after 30 days and begins the claim follow up.

The point-of-care pricing toolkit can help your practice save money that would otherwise be spent tracking and writing off bad patient debt, which would increase cash flow, and reduce administrative costs and burdens. This toolkit can help your practice obtain eligibility verification and information about patient financial responsibility upfront.

Click here to download the point-of-care pricing toolkit.

This tip is part of the AMA Practice Management Center's "Prescription for a healthier practice" series.