Physician's Practice - November 2008 - (Page 16)

LETTERS INFO NEEDED “How in the world can I correct the system if I have no idea where the breakdown is?” So, will I participate in PQRI 2008? Of course. As Shirley Grace suggested in the article, it is inevitable that CMS will soon begin to penalize nonparticipants. But you can bet that I will scour the list of reportable measures to choose those that are easiest to report and require as little “quality care” as possible, such as screening for proteinuria in diabetes, administration of Pneumovax, and asking about smoking. Why should I report on diabetic or blood pressure control and give CMS data to use “against” me? And if CMS continues to hide the data and blame the physician for the deﬁ- ciencies of its own systems, then I, along with many of my colleagues, will need to decide if it makes ﬁnancial sense to continue to provide care to America’s senior citizens. —Ronald Hirsch, MD Elgin, Ill. Finally, although it is clear that my data, and certainly the data of many other physicians, is incorrect, there is no mechanism for appeal. What they give is what you get, or don’t get, in my case. Think about it: This is pay-for-reporting, not pay-for-performance. I would bet that over 90 percent of the physicians who participated but did not get a payment agree that the systems in their ofﬁces worked correctly, but once the claim left their ofﬁces and entered the incomprehensible world of the clearinghouse and CMS payment mechanisms, something beyond our control went wrong. EMR BATTLE ROYALE I agree with your point about the issue of EMR adoption (“The Bigger Picture,” July/August 2008), speciﬁcally that if a practice purchases a system that winds up being unsupported because the vendor goes under, it leads to some major problems. Closed ﬁle formats are another major concern. In my opinion open standards (think HTML or XML) are the only way to go, and I would hesitate to adopt an EMR that uses any sort of proprietary ﬁle format to store my data. —Mike Ford, MD Bellingham, Wash. 16 | PHYSICIANS PRACTICE | NOVEMBER 2008 WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM http://healthcaregoesmobile.com http://WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Physician's Practice - November 2008

Physician's Practice - November 2008 Contents Death of Solo Practice Just a Myth Letters HSAy What? Noteworthy Finding Lost Revenue: The Search for Billing and Coding Gold Getting More: Our Annual Physician Compensation Survey ’Tis the Season to be Neutral Ask the Experts Evaluating Paperless Labs HR in a Box? The Guide Coding Third-Party Audits on the Rise Branding the Cash-Only Practice Intra-Office Tug-of-Wars Stickin‘ Up For Yourself Classifieds Advertiser Index

Physician's Practice - November 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.