Cathy oversees clinical and professional services for Net Health. Cathy gained over 25 years of expertise in various acute care, long-term care, sub-acute care facilities, home-health agencies, and outpatient wound care department settings. She is the author of The Clinical Wound Manager™ Manual Series, Clinical Guide to Skin and Wound Care – Seventh Edition (also translated into Italian and Portuguese).
When working in a wound care department, it is the clinician’s responsibility to understand the rules and regulations guiding the department’s wound documentation and billing processes. These rules are generated from the Fiscal Intermediary, carriers, Medicare Administrative Contractors, National Coverage Determination, respective Local Coverage Decisions (LCD), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, The Joint Commission,…
In my last column, 2018 Checklist: Organizing Your Department for the New Year (January 2018), we discussed the value of checklists and how they can be created and used as written guides to help your team meet key steps in compliance. In this column, we will look at the value of developing and managing your clinical documentation…
Launching into a new year brings opportunity to review the work plan created and implemented by you and your team. The underpinning for the work plan resides in the data collected within the medical record. The medical record serves as the instrument for demonstrating the clinician’s ability to plan, coordinate, and evaluate patient care. Proper…
Welcome to the last Practice Points column in 2017! It has been quite a busy year integrating the new Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). Let’s look back at what we learned this year about MIPS and lean into using smart strategies in 2018. Looking Back: MIPS and Your Workflow Reviewing the Quality Payment Program,1 you earn a payment…
In the last installment in this column, October’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System Audit Checklist for 2017, we reviewed a sample MIPS Audit Checklist to support your documentation. One of the items included in the checklist was source documents. Source documents are the primary documentation requested for review during an audit (postattestation or reporting). At times during…
In previous columns, we have discussed the roadmap to Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) strategy and documentation. Your documentation may be subject to an audit so, you will need to provide information to verify your MIPS participation. This column will begin to discuss the data validation and audit criteria. In the next column, we will…
The key to successful Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) reporting is your engagement in the process. As discussed in previous columns, there are 4 categories of MIPS-eligible clinician performance contributing to a composite performance score of up to 100 points: Quality (weighted at 60% for 2017), Advancing Care Information (weighted at 25% for 2017), Improvement…
In last month’s column, we discussed the first part of the “Quality Payment Program: Advancing Care Information Performance Category” and focused on how the Advancing Care Information (formerly known as Meaningful Use) could be reweighted based on select criteria. We also reviewed measure set options for reporting. In this column, we review how the base,…
In my recent Practice Points columns, we have discussed “Clinical Quality Measures and Meaningful Use” (May 2014) and “Quality Measures and Physician Quality Reporting System” (June 2014). Within each column, we discussed the importance of each program and how it truly benefits you. I have received a number of questions related to each program-specifically, the…
Today, the focus with any wound care practice is documentation compliance. Not only are documenting details imperative for clinical outcomes and benchmarking your work, but also the chart that used to sit silently for years as the “alone” clinical record could possibly be viewed as a legal document for a malpractice claim, provide information to…