A consultant walks through the three areas that put medical and dental practices at financial and legal risk: billing practices with insurers and Medicare, coding accuracy and documentation, and whether they've done the required HIPAA security assessment. Fixing these fast matters because gaps can cost revenue and trigger penalties.
When we begin with the client, the very first thing we do is we do what we call a hot target analysis. And essentially there are a number of key areas that we see as a target on, on every practice's back. So how they operate their financial policy, do they use discounts? Are they in the commercial payer business? Are they billing Medicare? And then how are they coding and how are they documenting? Uh, those are key things. And are they documenting to the guidelines that need to be met? Informed consent. We see, uh, many times that there's inadequate, either informed consent form itself and also the process as to how informed consent is conducted within the practice. We review their CPT code utilization to see if there's anything out of whack. We see what types of services that they perform and then how are they coding those services today? And is that accurate? When is the most recent security risk analysis that they performed? Because those have to be done every 2 years under HIPAA rules. And those are the types of things, and the list is longer than that, Val, but those are the things that are on our hot target list that if we find problems in, in these particular areas, we want to fix them as fast as possible. And so we correct those because they are the, again, hot targets.
