pMD - Mobile Charge Capture Solution to Upcoming PQRS Requirements
(PRWEB) October 09, 2013 -- Looming deadlines and penalties by Medicare's Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) will affect many medical professionals across various specialties, requiring action as early as October 15 of this year.
PQRS was once a predominantly voluntary payment-incentivized program, however, it is becoming a requirement, leaving many practices scrambling to understand how it will affect them and how to best incorporate it into their current system by the upcoming deadlines.
pMD's mobile charge capture software, which allows doctors to enter hospital charges and patient handoff notes at the point of care, makes the PQRS reporting process easy and intuitive.
Created in 2007, PQRS was designed to promote the reporting of quality patient care rendered by medical professionals through a set of established performance measures and quality codes. Incentive payments have been provided to eligible individuals and practices who satisfactorily report data on quality measures for covered Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) services.
Beginning in 2015, individuals and groups who are PQRS non-compliant may receive a 1.5 percent penalty of allowable Medicare payments based on data reporting from 2013. In 2016, this penalty will increase to 2 percent based on data reporting from 2014. These reimbursement penalties further stress the importance of being prepared for the rapidly approaching PQRS changes and finding an efficient and manageable way to incorporate PQRS into a practice's billing system.
“Tracking PQRS measures with a paper system is extremely difficult, not to mention hugely time-consuming,” pMD CEO Philippe d’Offay said. “And if a PQRS code submission is missed during the initial billing cycle, it is very difficult to retroactively submit these quality codes, making it crucial to identify and select PQRS codes at the point of care.”
pMD allows doctors to select PQRS quality codes up front when they are in the hospital, dialysis clinic or nursing home entering charges from their smartphones after seeing a patient. The software recognizes if an eligible PQRS measure has been triggered through a combination of ICD and CPT codes and prompts a list of PQRS quality-data codes to be submitted along with the billing charges. The PQRS reporting is seamlessly integrated into a group's workflow.
Marilyn J. Orr, an administrator at Tri-State Pulmonary Associates in Ohio, explained how her group has greatly benefitted from pMD's PQRS tracking features.
“pMD's on-the-fly PQRS support is incredible; it's by far the easiest way to participate that I have experienced,” Marilyn said. “The system automatically prompts our physicians when an appropriate patient scenario is encountered, and we can easily capture the correct code every time for claims submission. I'm so excited that we can use pMD for PQRS in addition to our hospital charge capture and outpatient appointment scheduling. With this feature alone, pMD has more than paid for itself.”
pMD’s mobile charge capture software supports physicians by allowing them to enter their patient charges into Android, iPhone, iPad, iPad Mini and iPod Touch devices at the point of patient care. The patient visit is then visible to other doctors within the practice and can be billed immediately. Doctors using charge capture are increasing their ROI in a time where Medicare cuts, ICD-10, PQRS and other costs are significantly impacting profitability. pMD increases efficiencies in a practice through automation, and it provides free interfaces with most major electronic medical records, hospital information, and medical billing systems, including Allscripts Pro PM, Allscripts Tiger, athenaCollector by athenahealth (athena), Cerner, Epic, GE Centricity (formerly Millbrook and IDX), MEDITECH, NextGen and Sage Intergy. For more information, visit pmd.com.
pMD, pMD, http://www.pmd.com, (800) 587-4989, [email protected]
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