Photo by César Badilla Miranda on Unsplash
Medicare Pricing and Hidden Costs
As CMS plans to roll out is Medicare price-control plans, one industry expert is asking whether the approach could end up reducing innovation and costing patients more in the long run.
Source: Forbes
—PM Pulse Check—
Does anyone have any recommendations for accurately reading radiology procedures—MRI and CT scans, UltraSounds—for optimum accuracy and/or for the best ways to write these reports so insurance is "happy" with them?
—Jim Fisher, DPM
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PM Pulse wants to hear from you! Submit your questions, concerns, and opinions to [email protected] to share and receive feedback from your colleagues and peers about all aspects of the podiatry sector. All submissions must meet our standards for professionalism and decorum, and submissions may be edited for length and clarity. Still have questions? Send us an email.
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Cybersecurity Gaps That Could Cost You
1. Turn on multifactor authentication everywhere
Change Healthcare is the cautionary tale: attackers reached a system that had no second layer of login protection, and 192.7 million records followed. Multifactor authentication (MFA) closes the single most exploited door in health care, the stolen or guessed password. Turn it on for every account that touches ePHI, not just the EHR: email, billing, scheduling, imaging viewers, cloud storage, remote desktop and VPN. Pay special attention to administrative and remote-access accounts, which give an intruder the most room to move.
Authenticator apps and hardware keys are stronger than text-message codes, which can be intercepted. The proposed HIPAA Security Rule would make MFA mandatory with only narrow exceptions, so this is both the highest-value fix and the first thing an auditor will look for. If you do nothing else on this list, do this.
Source: Keith A. Reynolds, Physicians Practice
Get the Conversations Started!
PM Pulse wants to hear from you! Submit your questions, concerns, and opinions to [email protected] to share and receive feedback from your colleagues and peers about all aspects of the podiatry sector. All submissions must meet our standards for professionalism and decorum, and submissions may be edited for length and clarity. Still have questions? Send us an email.
Social Media Post of the Day
Anne Sharkey, DPM, was a featured speaker at last week’s APMA National Conference in Nashville, and her appearance was made all the more memorable by the fact that her daughter got to see her mom in action at the show.
Salvaging Patient Balances After Write-Off
8. Let patients book and reschedule themselves online
Patients already manage travel, dinner reservations and car repairs from their phones, and they expect the same from health care. When the only way to change an appointment is to call during business hours, some patients simply give up and become a no-show rather than navigate the phone tree.
Offering self-service scheduling removes that friction. Let patients rebook or cancel from the reminder itself, at whatever hour works for them, and you convert would-be no-shows into clean reschedules. It also quietly reduces call volume for staff. Surveys consistently show strong demand for online scheduling across every age group, not just younger patients, so this is less a generational bet than a baseline expectation.
Source: Keith A. Reynolds, Physicians Practice
From the Magazine:
Wound Healing Coding Update—Part 1
Much discussion has taken place since last summer regarding revisions to the Cellular Tissue Product (CTP) policy. Changes to the policy were warranted by the rapid growth in Medicare spending from $250M in 2017 to $10B in 2024.
Editor’s Note: Part 2 of this article will run in our September issue.
Is US Healthcare Already Mostly Socialized?
Nobel prizewinning and left-leaning economist Paul Krugman argues that our current healthcare system has largely already become what some people are warning against.
Get the Conversations Started!
PM Pulse wants to hear from you! Submit your questions, concerns, and opinions to [email protected] to share and receive feedback from your colleagues and peers about all aspects of the podiatry sector. All submissions must meet our standards for professionalism and decorum, and submissions may be edited for length and clarity. Still have questions? Send us an email.
From the Magazine:
The Power of PEMF for Podiatry
This technology, well-known for healing fractures, can also be a valuable tool for reducing inflammation and pain.
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