EMRs and the Coder: How to Prepare for the Electronic Medical Records Challenge

Your Expert Presenters:
Georgette Gustin, CPC, CCS-P, CHC, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Georgette is a Director within the Healthcare Industries practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and is based out of the Indianapolis, Indiana office. She has more than 16 years of experience in the healthcare industry and served as the President of the American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) National Advisory Board from April 2001-2003. Timothy P. Blanchard, McDermott Will & Emery LLP Timothy P. Blanchard is a partner in the Los Angeles office of McDermott Will & Emery LLP. His practice focuses on health care regulatory issues, including Medicare and Medicaid billing and payment, fraud and abuse audits and investigations, health care compliance programs, HIPAA Privacy Rule, medical necessity and utilization review and certification and licensing.
Who Should Download
This audio conference benefits a wide variety of health care professionals. Billing and coding staff Physicians and non-physician practitioners Practice administrators & executives Front office staff Compliance officers Consultants There is no limit to the number of staff from your office who can participate. One registration fee lets your entire staff listen in via speakerphone! Save money — no travel expenses!

The heat is on to move physician offices to electronic medical records (EMR) systems. Case-in-point: Medicare expects its new push into pay-for-performance to soon rely solely on EMR data. Indeed, EMRs are terrific tools for data mining, and physicians like all the great template options that allow faster documentation. But EMRs also pose some serious potential coding compliance problems.

Don’t let the EMR become the latest OIG target for your practice. Get practical solutions for choosing and using EMRs from nationally known speakers Georgette Gustin, director in the healthcare consulting practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Tim Blanchard, a healthcare attorney with McDermott, Will & Emery in Los Angeles.

Sign up for this 90-minute Webinar and walk away a better-informed EMR consumer and user after the powerhouse team of Gustin and Blanchard reveal common coding vulnerabilities and ambiguities, including:

Pre-populated findings. Many EMRs use macros to “auto-populate” – a fancy way of saying they automatically include certain information in the record. Find out how to work with your providers to make sure the record accurately reflects what they did – and so your practice doesn’t flirt with documentation and malpractice disaster!
Information pulled forward. Some EMRs automatically pull forward data from previous encounters such as problem lists, medication lists, and history information. Learn whether you can count HPI, ROS and PFSH elements if you can’t tell when they were performed or who documented them.
Templates. They’re popular features with physicians, but they raise your practice’s audit exposure if all documentation starts to look alike. Make sure you and your coding staff are the ones who educate your physicians to use templates while still preserving patient-specific and date-specific medical-necessity data.
E/M guidelines. EMRs that automatically calculate the E/M level can put you at compliance risk, especially if they prompt physicians to provide more exam bullets to bill up a level. Ensure that your practice isn’t caught fraudulently upcoding.

Approved for 1.5 CEUs

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One registration fee lets your entire staff listen in! Save money - no travel expenses!