Seventeen Red Flags for Chiropractic Billing Audit

Seventeen Red Flags for Chiropractic Billing Audit

Dr. Ben Lerner, founder of Teach The World About Chiropractic and author of "One Minute Wellness," discovered a uniquely convenient way to educate thousands of chiropractors about coding compliance and audit risk reduction. "Compliance maintenance requires special skills and military discipline," says Dr. Lerner. "Webinars are ideal for audit risk management instruction because they deliver urgently needed education but require minimal investment in terms of time and cost."

According to Improper Medicare FFS Payment Report (2003), "Chiropractors have the highest provider compliance error rate in Medicare, filing claims incorrectly 30.6% of the time."

Increasing frequency of post-payment insurance audits and mounting severity of penalties, ranging from license suspension to heavy monetary fines, emphasize the need for effective and affordable education about compliant office management and audit risks.

"No insurance company offers protection against potentially enormous penalties in case of post-payment audit," says Jeff Randolph, Esq., Legal Counsel to the Association of New Jersey Chiropractors and a webinar author. "The severity of provider penalties following post-payment audit have escalated in the past two to three years from relatively non-adversarial audits and occasional return of payments to very high fines, suspension or loss of license, and imprisonment."

What is a Webinar on Billing Audit Risk?

If any chiropractic practice has a 30.6% chance of being audited and no insurance offers protection against audit risk, then the only rational way to protect the practice is to develop an in-house audit defense strategy.

Doctors and practice managers are looking for cost-effective and productive ways to learn better ways to manage their practice and revenue cycle. The key benefit of the webinar is its convenience - there is no travel required and important information is delivered in ninety-minute sessions that make it easy for even the busiest doctors to quickly gain important information on topics ranging from successfully implementing EMR systems, to understanding the real benefits and challenges of outsourced billing services, risk management of post-payment audits, and much more.

Webinars leverage Internet to bring together remote participants while viewing the same visuals or computer application. An audit risk webinar teaches chiropractors to build an effective and efficient in-house audit defense strategy and offers three-fold benefit to its participants:

• Lower audit risk because of SOAP note compliance and audit exposure monitoring

• Higher revenue because of more effective billing

• Improved efficiency of patient flow management

Expert Content

A Chiropractic Audit Webinar has three parts:

• Coding:
  • CPT (Current Procedure Terminology) Codes
  • E&M Codes
  • Modalities
  • ICD-9 Coding

• Medical Necessity Documentation:
  • SOAP Notes
  • Treatment Plan

• Audit Management:
  • Seventeen Audit Red Flags
  • Audit Exposure Monitoring
  • What to do if audited?