Charlie Colitre, President, Healthcare Compliance Consultants

The 2010 OIG Work Plan

Each September, the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General (OIG), publishes its work plan for the following year. The work plan outlines those areas of healthcare fraud enforcement on which the OIG will focus for the coming fiscal year.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Section of the 2010 Work Plan lists a large number of areas that will be scrutinized during the US Government’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2010. Within the “Other Part A and Part B Providers Payments” section, the following 22 items concerning physicians are listed:

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Machelle Giordon, Credentialing Specialist

At the Eye of the Storm...

Managing all the paperwork associated with provider enrollment is tedious, time-consuming, and requires dedicated attention to administer effectively.  Lacking full-time resources to devote to these tasks inevitably causes approvals to be stalled or delayed.  The desire to do it right, and fear of making costly mistakes, causes many practices to chose to handle their credentialing and contracting in-house. 

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Stephanie Black

Office Tips for Effective E-mail Messages

Most often e-mail users neglect to check how there communication will come across to their readers.  To make sure your e-mail doesn’t short circuit a business relationship, consider these common sense guidelines:

• Think about who may read your message.
• Try to picture how your message’s receiver will react when reading your message.

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OSMA

• 12-02-09 Coding and Billing for Cardiology Services     
• 12-09-09/10 Code Changes and RAC Readiness              
• 2-11-10 Professional Coding Curriculum (PMCC)          
• 4-9-2010 OSMA Annual Meeting       

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Pat O'Sullivan,  President

Internal Controls Critical Now 

More than ever before, Internal Controls in our businesses are so critical for assurance of compliance, regulatory, financial and human resource management.  One of the biggest mistakes a medical practice makes when the physician starts out is to think, “we’re only three people, we don’t need a lot of policies and procedures…we’re not IBM!”.  Then all of a sudden, there are four people, two physicians, a nurse, a supervisor and suddenly someone embezzles money, has a personal leave, or is rude to a patient and they leave the practice.  These are all realistic occurrences in a practice every day.

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