Azalea Health Innovations Friends Newsletter – December 2009

IN THIS ISSUE

* Welcome
* AHI Infrastructure and Applications Now on Rackspace Cloud
* Physicians Who Use EHRs Pay Fewer Malpractice Claims
* Billing Tips – Medicare to Eliminate Consultation Codes in 2010
* Meaningful Use Update
* Upcoming Events

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Welcome

Greetings to all of our Azalea Health Innovations friends. We hope you enjoy the holidays and this month’s Newsletter. Happy New Year to all and see you in 2010.

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AHI Infrastructure and Applications Now on Rackspace Cloud

Azalea Health Innovations, Inc. (AHI) has recently chosen Rackspace Cloud to run AHI’s healthcare applications on Rackspace Cloud Servers™. AHI chose Rackspace Cloud because it reduces IT infrastructure complexity and expense by offering the ability to instantly expand compute power during times of high demand. Rackspace Cloud Servers™ can be deployed quickly and offer a solution that can be easily scalable. Azalea Health Innovation’s applications are Software-as-a-service (SaaS) which gives the users more freedom to access their applications and user data. Rackspace Cloud solutions are ideal for companies that use the SaaS model. We look forward to a great future with our hosting partner Rackspace Cloud.

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Physicians Who Use EHRs Pay Fewer Malpractice Claims

A study that was done by the AAFP suggests that physician practices that use EMR’s have fewer paid malpractice claims. The study looked at 10 years of data and here are some of what is found in the study. There was a significant amount of fewer malpractice claims with physicians using EMR’s to “tip the scale” in favor of EMR implementation. “High users” of EMR technology( defined as using 50% or more of the EMR functions) paid less malpractice claims over the 10 year study period than did “low users” of EMR’s suggesting that just getting an EMR is not enough, the physician must utilize the functions of the EMR.

The full report can be found by going to the link below:
http://www.aafp.org/online/en/home/publications/news/news-now/practice-management/20081223ehrmalpractice.html

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Billing Tips – Medicare to Eliminate Consultation Codes in 2010

Medicare’s announcement that they will no longer pay for consultation codes shocked the medical industry, leaving doctors worried about their income and perplexed about how to handle the new situation. Specialists will be affected the most by this change — 20%-30% — between visit and consult codes. To offset the elimination of office consult payments, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will increase the work relative value units (RVUs) for new and established office visits by about 6% and the work RVUs for initial hospital and facility visits by approximately 0.3% to reflect the elimination of the facility consultation codes.

Under this new rule:

-Use codes for new (99201-99205) or established (99211-99215) patients to replace consultations in the office/outpatient setting (99241-99245).

-Codes in the inpatient hospital setting (99221-99223) should be used to replace inpatient consultation codes (99251-99255), and for nursing facility consultations use codes (99304-99306).
To distinguish the difference between the admitting physician of record from the consultants for initial hospital inpatient and nursing facility admissions, Medicare has developed modifier AI.

-The principal physician of record will append modifier “-AI” Principal Physician of Record, to the E/M code when billed. This modifier will identify the physician who oversees the patient’s care from all other physicians who may be furnishing specialty care. All other physicians who perform an initial evaluation on this patient will bill only the E/M code for the complexity level performed.

For more information and to read the official MLN Matters Article released by Medicare please visit our website: http://www.azaleahealth.com/resources

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Meaningful Use Update

The ONC and CMS released an update on 12/30/2009 on Meaningful use in regards to EMR/EHR adoption. Visit our website in the days to come for an outline of the update.

To read the news release please link here: http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2009pres/12/20091230a.html

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Upcoming Events

AHI will be attending CLMA ThinkLab 2010 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 4-5, 2010. Please stop by our booth and say hi!

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Thank you!

Azalea Health Innovations, Inc.
100 North Patterson Street
Valdosta, GA 31601
Toll Free: 877-777-7686
Local: 229-269-4620
Toll Free Fax: 866-683-8679
Web: http://www.AzaleaHealth.com
Email: info@azaleahealth.com

Click the links below to stay in touch:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Azalea-Health-Innovations/145238319941?ref=ts
http://twitter.com/azaleahealth

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