"Physical therapy is not a subspecialty of the medical profession and physical therapists are not medical doctors; we are a separate profession that provides a unique service that physicians are unable and untrained to provide."

Letter to the AMA from the APTA, Dec 2009

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

In Florida, therapists over $3700 cap screwed because Medicare appeals on hold

The Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals, which is overwhelmed, has decided to bring the cases filed by beneficiaries to the front of the line.  That means appeals by hospitals, nursing homes, doctors and other health-care providers could be on hold for two years.

The office has a backload of nearly 357,000 claims, according to a memo sent by the office's chief judge to health care associations, as Kaiser Health News reports. The memo said the agency has seen its caseload soar 184 percent over the past three years, while the number of administrative law judges has remained about the same.

The glut follows Medicare's decision to hire private auditors to comb through cases and find over-billing. Hospitals say that since auditors get a bonus when they flag a case, they have an incentive to over-do it.

Indeed, a 2012 investigation by the inspector general of Health and Human Services found that judges reversed payment denials 72 percent of the time for hospital care. Beneficiaries had only a 28 percent rate of reversal.

The American Hospital Association said it would make more sense to halt the audits of hospital claims while the backlog is being addressed. AHA also said the federal agency is breaking a law that requires a decision on appeals to be rendered within 90 days.

Meanwhile, consumer advocates say beneficiaries have had to wait as long as two years for a hearing and another nine months for a decision.

Sometimes they die before the process is over.

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Tim Richardson, PT owns a private practice at Medical Arts Rehabilitation, Inc in Palmetto, Florida. The clinic website is at MedicalArtsRehab.com.

Bulletproof Expert Systems: Clinical Decision Support for Physical Therapists in the Outpatient Setting is a manager's workbook with stories, checklists, charts, graphs, tables, and templates describing how you can use paper-based or computerized tools to improve your clinic's Medicare compliance, process adherence and patient outcomes.

Tim has implemented a computerized Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system in his clinic since 2006 that serves as a Reminder, Alerting, Prompting and Predicting CDS using evidence-based tests and measures.

Tim can be reached at
TimRichPT@BulletproofPT.com .

"Make Decisions like Doctors"


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Consistent with the American Physical Therapy Association Vision Statement for Physical Therapy 2020, the American Physical Therapy Association supports exclusive physical therapist ownership and operation of physical therapy services.