Well, folks… it’s that scary time of year once again. No, not Halloween. It may be October, but in this blog, we won’t be talking about ghouls and goblins. Nope. As you may already know, October is also Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And there are scarier things out there to worry about than those imaginary monsters in your closet.

In a recent blog article, we examined how your payments solution could be costing your practice more than you realize. In one section of that article, we touched briefly on the costs associated with point of sale (POS) hardware. And cost certainly remains an important factor. These terminals are not cheap, after all, and are commonly priced anywhere from $150 to $1000 dollars. However, when it comes to payment terminals, there is more at stake than simply just the up-front costs of purchasing the hardware.

Whether called electronic medical records (EMR) or electronic health records (EHR), the basic idea is the same: Patient records are stored, maintained, and updated electronically. The underlying analytics and informatics components are nearly universal, but the input and output can be drastically different from one system to another, creating either challenges or opportunities.

While obviously providing exceptional patient care is an important goal for your practice, you are also trying to run a successful business. To accomplish this, your practice needs to be able to do what all successful businesses do—MAKE MONEY. These days, the ability to efficiently bring in revenue means having a digital payments solution. Unfortunately, when it comes to certain payment processing solutions, many practices are not getting much when you consider what they are paying.

Welcome to our second and final installment of this blog series on important changes in the 2022 Physician Fee Schedule (MIPS Proposed Rule). In Part 1, we took a look at key changes to the Quality Payment Program (QPP). In this blog, we will summarize the new MIPS Value Pathways (MVPs) as well as important changes to the Appropriate Use Criteria and EPCS Medicare Part D Compliance Requirements.

Studies have shown over and over that there are disparities in healthcare access and outcomes based on social determinants of health (SDOH) such as income and education level, environment, discrimination, and other factors. In recent years, we have seen attention turn to collecting information from patients regarding these factors and using them to help guide a patient’s care. In specialty settings, this is often seen as less important, and these factors are either not collected or dismissed as unimportant to patient care. This may all change in the near future, however, as CMS turns even more attention to the collection and use of these factors in patient care.

Back in mid-July, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the proposed rule for the 2022 Physician Fee Schedule. In this two-part blog series, we are going to take a look at some of the more notable changes in the 2022 MIPS proposed rule. In this first installment, we will be summarizing the proposed changes to the 2022 Quality Payment Program.

On July 19, 2021, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the 2022 proposed rule for the Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS). These changes are meant to increase reimbursement rates for OPPS, implement increased penalties for price transparency violations and reverse changes to the inpatient-only list (among other things).