when people think, “Do you have to bill electronically?” Obviously does Medicare prefer electronic claims? I think they do, but certainly you may still bill on paper. The same applies with electronic health records. Obviously, it's still voluntary, Medicare will punish you, of course by taking money away, but if you don't have them, they will still pay you. It's just knowing that you're going to get reductions, so in order to be more compliant, get a little more money, be compliant with these. I think these are simple because it's something we're already doing. It's no extra work. It's just reporting something you're already doing. Sam that was great and thank you for also offering where the doctors can obtain more of the information pertaining to their own practice. If it's okay with you, I’d like to just shift because I have one other question before we get ready to come to a close, when I have a lot of doctors that call me up and ask me questions about, “Well, I have three different associate doctors working for me or maybe I have an independent contractor in the office.” Last week, I had an independent contractor call me up and say, “Hey, the owner of the clinic wants this and what this is is the billing to go out to Medicare through one provider, no matter what provider in the office is actually the one seeing the patient and performing the adjustment.” What can you respond about doing that? Well, I'm glad you brought that up because that is something we definitely run a lot into. Let's start first with, you can certainly have associates in your office, treating Medicare patients, but they too have to be registered with Medicare. You cannot just hire someone and say, “Hey since you work for me, treat my Medicare patients.” They cannot. They too have to be registered and what is required on the billing is Medicare and any insurance frankly is going to require on the bill to indicate who did the service. In a 1500 form, if you go to the block 24, if looks to the very end, you’ll see block 24 J. It says NPI. That's where you would put the NPI of the provider who actually did the service, so even though we might have a company we call ABC Healthcare, if you treated the patient, your NPI number would appear on the line of services you've done and then another provider's NPI would appear on the line of service they’ve done. You cannot bill as far as the provider of service under another provider. We can bill under a corporation, but you cannot bill as that person. You must indicate that you did the service, which means they all have to be registered. I also want to address though, you brought up independent contractor and something that they have to really make sure to understand is that if you say someone is an independent contractor that really means they're independent. They don't bill under your name or tax id, because if they're independent, why are they billing under your name. Independent means independent. I think of independent much like I can rent space to someone in office, but their billing is going to go under their name, their tax id, though we may have the same address that's what independent is. If you're billing under my name, clearly you're not independent. That's going to be an IRS issue quite frankly, not to mention Medicare thinking that you might be trying to you take a non- Medicare provider to treat a Medicare patient and that is not allowed.
Dr. Stu:
Dr. Sam:
Dr. Stu:
Okay that was great but there has to be some options for the doctors with an exceptional situation. For instance, what if the doctor has a locum tenens or a fill in
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online