Monitor Mondays

"The peer-to-peer (P2P) process is a particularly abhorrent chore for physicians," reports Juliet Ugarte Hopkins, MD, a physician advisor for case management, utilization, and clinical documentation at ProHealth Care, Inc. in Wisconsin. "These phone conversations are generally offered by commercial and managed insurance plans when their clinical case manager or medical director does...

Should total knee replacements (TKRs) be performed as inpatient or outpatient procedures? Some facilities are admitting all of them as inpatient while other facilities take a more conservative approach to admission. How are TKRs being handled at your facility? Mary Beth Pace, vice president of care management at Trinity Health and the special guest on this edition of Monitor Mondays, frames the co...

Who bears the burden and blame of regulatory noncompliance when your facility relies on non-medical software companies that create electronic medical records? We will continue with the second part of this developing story during this episode of Monitor Mondays, when whistleblower attorney Mary Inman reports on an ongoing  qui tam  action under the federal False Claims Act through which a relator a...

On the rugged regulatory terrain, you might confront this issue: who bears the burden and blame of regulatory noncompliance when your facility relies on non-medical software companies that create electronic medical records? Many of these electronic records are self-populated. So, what happens if you undergo a Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) audit and are accused of wrongdoing? Offering insight int...

Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) reviews, underway right now by commercial health plans and government payers, are expected to continue through mid-May. Also expected at that time is a massive number of medical record requests from payers as they seek to improve their Medicare Advantage plan quality measurements, called Star Ratings, which are ultimately published on the C...

“We have been slammed with Medicare Advantage DRG audits,” wrote Sandra from Indiana during last week’s Monitor Mondays broadcast. We asked RACmonitor national correspondent J. Paul Spencer with DoctorsManagement to investigate this issue for this week's episode. Will there be more of these audits? Do these represent low-hanging fruit for auditors? Stay tuned. The episode rundown also include...

Monitor Mondays host and RACmonitor Publisher Chuck Buck will have the following all-star lineup of experts on hand to tell you what to watch out for in 2018 during this edition of the weekly internet broadcast: Duane Abbey, PhD Janelle Ali-Dinar, PhD Nancy Beckley, MS, MBA, CHC Frank Cohen, MPA William Dombi, Esq. Knicole Emanuel, Esq. Ronald Hirsch, MD, FACP, CHCQM Angela Phillips, PT Timothy Po...