Part B Insider (Multispecialty) Coding Alert

Register now for course starting in January

Want to get your physician up to speed on health information technology (HIT)? The American College of Physicians (ACP) is here to help.

The ACP is offering a HIT training course with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). The course includes a 15-week online curriculum and a day of in-person training as a pre-session course at ACP's Internal Medicine 2007 meeting on April 18.
The AMIA has a goal of training 10,000 health care professionals in applied health and medical informatics by 2010, as part of its 10x10 program.

The ACP's course will use materials that OHSU developed. The online sessions include readings, lectures, interactive discussion and self-assessment tests. The in-person session helps the professionals integrate the material, present their course projects, and meet one other as well as leaders in HIT.

The ACP course begins with online sessions on Jan. 3. Go to www.amia.org/10x10/partners/acp/ for more information.

In other news:

- Part B carriers should disclose the caps they-re imposing on the technical component (TC) of imaging procedures as part of their normal disclosure procedures, according to Transmittal 1083, dated Oct. 27. For 2007, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will compare the TC of physician imaging rates with outpatient hospital rates, but in the future carriers will have to make the comparison themselves.

- You-re allowed to submit National Provider Identifiers(NPIs) by themselves, but you should keep submitting old provider numbers along with them anyway, CMS says in Transmittal 249, dated Nov. 13. While the carriers are still testing systems, you risk having your NPI-only claims denied.

- A vacationing pain doctor came up with an interesting new definition of -locum tenens.- North Palm Beach, FL pain physician Seraphin Manfredonia pled guilty to distributing and dispensing controlled substances, prosecutors say. Manfredonia's patients had chronic pain, and he prescribed large quantities of pain medications for them, in many cases two or three monthly prescriptions per patient.

When Manfredonia went to Italy for three weeks, he made no arrangements for another doctor to cover his patients. Instead, he left a stack of pre-signed prescriptions for Dilaudid, Methadone, Percocet and Roxicodone with his office assistants, and asked them to write dates on them when the patients showed up for their appointments. Manfredonia's staff collected an $85 visit fee from each of the 36 patients who showed up while he was in Italy. Manfredonia faces up to 20 years in prison.