Anesthesia Business Consultants announces the successful completion of the Service Organization Controls (SOC) Report, Level 1. The independent SOC 1 Report was conducted by Plante & Moran, PLLC, a public accounting and consulting firm who evaluated and tested the company’s internal operational controls and processes. The SOC 1 Report is an e ...

The Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI) was founded in 2009 to promote patient safety and quality management efforts across the specialty. The primary mission of the AQI is development of the National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry (NACOR), a repository for anesthesia case-specific data from across the country. NACOR is populated by transmiss ...

Advanced Integration Streamlines Data Collection to Speed Billing, Improve Efficiency and Enhance AnalysisAnesthesia Business Consultants (ABC) announces that it has partnered with Surgical Information Systems (SIS), a leading anesthesia information management system (AIMS) provider, to streamline revenue cycle workflow.  The alliance provides ...

Anesthesia Business Consultants' (ABC) dedication to the complex and intricate specialty of anesthesia and pain management requires continued commitment to technology and collaboration with the technology leaders in the industry.  ABC and Picis are pleased to announce a strategic partnership to leverage the combined strengths of technology and ...

Join Jody Locke, our Vice President of Anesthesia and Pain Practice Management, at his speaking engagement this month.Jody will be speaking on "Hospital Contracting: New Rules for a New Era" on March 17th at Washington State Society of Anesthesiologists Spring Scientific Meeting.  The meeting will be held at the Bell H ...

With remarkable timing, news of a lawsuit brought by the parents of a teenager left in a permanent vegetative state after a routine endoscopy coincides with the announcement that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Premarket Approval for the SEDASYS® system, a computer-assisted personalized sedation system. The patient was ...

Astonishingly, after decades of discussion, there is still a lot of uncertainty as to what the anesthesia medical direction rules mean by the requirement that the medically-directing anesthesiologist be “immediately available.”There has never been a numerical time or distance limit for “immediately available,” although there was a substantial debat ...

What do orthopedic surgery, cardiology, radiology, gastroenterology and urology have in common?  Compensation in all five specialties is higher, on average, than it is for anesthesiology, according to Medscape’s Physician Compensation Report: 2013. Anesthesiology has slipped from fourth place to sixth place among the most highly-com ...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (OIG) last week published parallel proposed rules that would remove certain obstacles to hospitals’ paying for the electronic health record (EHR) technologies used by anesthesiologists, pain specialists and ...

One of the Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs), Noridian Administrative Services LLC, has published a proposed policy that would bar payment for peripheral nerve blocks placed pre-operatively for the management of post-operative pain.  According to the draft policy, entitled Nerve Blockade: Somatic, Selective Nerve Root, and Epidural,Re ...

Anesthesia practices that accept Visa and MasterCard payments are among the “merchants” that may be able to collect a portion of the fees paid to the card issuers under the proposed settlement in the Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation pending in federal District Court in New York.  The clas ...

On January 25, 2013, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued its long-awaited Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) final omnibus regulations (Final Rule). The Final Rule modified the HIPAA Privacy, Security, Enforcement and Breach Notification Rules (HIPAA Rules) and is ...

Physicians who refer or order services for Medicare patients must be enrolled in PECOS, the Medicare Provider Enrollment, Chain, and Ownership System database, and physicians who bill Medicare are required to list the name and National Provider Identifier (NPI) of the ordering/referring physician on their claims in order to be paid.  ...

Benjamin Franklin said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It is certain that Mr. Franklin was not speaking about the value of preemptive compliance work, yet the old adage aptly applies to the work done by physician groups to prevent allegations of fraud or abuse. The Office of Inspector General for the Department of Healt ...

ABC is receiving some very good questions from anesthesia and pain practices regarding more details on how the sequestration 2% Medicare payment cut will impact their reimbursement.  We are continuing to monitor various Medicare carriers’ websites, including Palmetto, CGS, Novitas, First Coast Service Options and NHIC. These Q&As can help ...

“The Competition” These days I hear that term from more and more anesthesia group leaders, and I’m sure that you’re thinking about it more than you’d like. From the Latin root competitionem, its meaning originated in the sense of rivalry, of a contest for something. Since at least the 1790s, it’s been used to describe rivalry in the ...

The American Hospital Association (AHA) has just released a report that describes the strategies that will help its nearly 5,000 member hospitals succeed in the value-based healthcare environment.  This report, Metrics for the Second Curve of Health Care, will be of interest to all anesthesiologists who want to understand and meet their h ...

The creation of the Medicare/Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program (commonly known as the “Meaningful Use Program”) gave physicians and hospitals a strong incentive to integrate EHRs into their practices. (For more information regarding Meaningful Use, see “Proposed Meaningful Use Stage 2—What it Means to the Anesthesia ...

There is no doubt that the emergence of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) program is changing the way providers capture documentation on the front end. According to the 2012 NCHS Data Brief, 55 percent of physician groups have already adopted an EHR. Among the 45 percent that have yet to implement an EHR system, nearly half plan to purchase or ...

In last week’s Alert, we summarized the requirements for participating in Medicare’s Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) in 2013.  One of the major changes to the PQRS program—which we deferred until this week—is the implementation of the Value-Based Payment Modifier (VBM) for groups of 100 or more eligible professionals (EPs), consistin ...

“Cloud Computing” is a phrase we hear thrown about constantly in the technology industry these days. To the casual observer, it can be synonymous with the internet or perhaps used to identify a specific program available over the web. Large organizations such as hospitals typically understand the nuance that exists when discussing and integrating c ...