Cardiology Coding Alert

Presented by Kristine Eckis The following supplement to Cardiology Coding Alert is the transcript of a teleconference presented by The Coding Institute. To obtain the slides for the conference, please log on to our Online Subscription System at http://codinginstitute.com/login and download the current issue, and the slides will be contained therein. If you're not sure how to use the Online Subscription System or need help downloading the issue, please contact our customer service department at 1-800-508-2582 or service@medville.com, and one of our representatives will be able to assist you.

The speaker for the teleconference, Kristine Eckis is President of The Bottom Line Medical Administrative Consultants, Inc. "Bottom Line" celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2005. With 26 years of combined medical and legal experience, Kristine consults with medical practices nationwide providing evaluations and recommendations for operational improvements and accounts receivable management. She also assists with practice start-ups and provides coding education and chart audits, both on and off-site. She is a Board Member of the American Association of Healthcare Consultants and a member of the National Association of Healthcare Consultants and AHIMA. Kristine has been accredited by the American Academy of Professional Coders as a Certified Professional Coder since 1996. Thank you Mandy.  It is a pleasure to be with all of you this morning.  Welcome to the seminar.  I hope that you will be able to take something back to your practices and improve with what we are going to go over today. 

Before we look at the actual targets for 2005, I would like to provide you with a little glimpse of past activities by the OIG and CMS.  To give you a little background will help you understand where it is going and how successful it has been and why we need not to stick our heads in the sand and think we do not need to pay attention to this or it is not going to affect us.  This is just not something we have to worry about because it absolutely is, and it is not going to go away and you will hear me say that probably two or three more times today.

First of all back in 1996, CMS was known as HCFA, which was Health care Finance Administration and they implemented a plan to audit approximately 20% of all physician practices over the following five years.  They hired 350 FBI agents, which a lot of people do not know.  They also hired private contractors to help them conduct the audits and to assist with the endeavor and their initial results were staggering.  They collected $23 for every dollar they invested into this effort.  So it was very, very lucrative for them. 

Well then HIPAA [...]