Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Bonus:  Physician can't be sued for emergency care to other doctors' patients.

When physicians apply for a national provider identifier, they should include their old identification numbers for other payers--not just for Medicare.

This will help payers to develop "crosswalks" between a provider's old number and their NPI. If providers include a Medicaid number, they need to list the state name as well, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services advises in an April 7 email to providers. 

In other news:

· CMS issued an interim final rule on training for medical residents in areas affected by natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. If a "home hospital" temporarily closes parts of its residency programs, a "host hospital" can accept the residents. Medicare will continue to fund those residents in their new programs. Hospitals will be able to set up emergency graduate medical education agreements that are more flexible than usual GME agreements.

· A doctor who responds to an emergency and treats another doctor's patient in the hospital is protected from medical liability under the "Good Samaritan" statute, the California Court of Appeals for the Fourth District ruled in Covarrubias v. Kady (D046529).
 
Tarek Kady wasn't the doctor in charge of Ruben Covarrubias' delivery, but he was in the hospital checking on one of his pediatric patients when a nurse told him a baby "in distress" was being delivered. He cancelled his appointments and stayed to help with the delivery and post-delivery resuscitative efforts. The parents sued the hospital, their regular doctor and Kady. The court ruled that a doctor who renders emergency assistance to the patient of another doctor in the hospital is protected by the same law that shelters a doctor who stops to help an accident victim by the road.