Contents tagged with administrative burden
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AAFP leaders advocate for improved access to primary care and more this month on Capitol Hill
By AAFP’s Federal Advocacy Team
On October 12, AAFP’s president, president-elect, and board chair traveled to Washington D.C., to meet with members of Congress and their staff to advocate for key AAFP legislative priorities. Here’s what they discussed:
Stop Medicare payment cuts
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WAC is Wack
5 ways to improve practice efficiency, increase revenue, and reduce burden
By Kate Freeman, MPH AAFP Quality Improvement Strategist
Primary care in the United States is becoming increasingly … more
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TAFP’s top 10 news stories of 2012
As another year draws to an end and we’re once again waiting to see what Congress will do to about the SGR and the fiscal cliff-tastrophy, your TAFP Communications staff put together a list of the top 10 news stories from Texas Family Physician and TAFP News Now based on unique page views recorded through our analytics system.
Not surprisingly, it shows that family physicians are concerned about the practice environment and the future. These stories outline new regulations, administrative burden, experimental practice and payment models, and the future of the specialty.
1. TMB rules you may not know but should
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Standardization can relieve administrative burden, if we can get there
The amount of time and money physicians and their staffs spend on the administrative tasks of medicine is astounding. A recent perspective article in the New England Journal of Medicine quantifies it this way: “The average physician spends 43 minutes a day interacting with health plans about payment, dealing with formularies, and obtaining authorizations for procedures,” and physician practices hire coding and billing staff “who spend their days translating clinical records into billing forms and submitting and monitoring reimbursements.”
That translates to an annual cost of $361 billion spent on health care administration, and half of these expenditures are unnecessary.
The authors argue that standardization is key to reducing administrative costs, and much of this can be achieved through health information technology and electronic health records. Though they say the only entity with the “clout” to push through standards in medical transactions is the federal government, measures in the Affordable Care Act and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH)—like instituting regulations on payers and providing incentives to physicians and facilities—may start us on the right path when previous efforts have failed.
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What’s inside managed care’s black box?
What’s inside managed care’s black box?
By Jonathan Nelson
As the sun sets on the Texas Department of Insurance, opportunities abound to sneak a peek at how health insurers do business
Here’s a … more
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What if auto insurance was run like health insurance?
By Stephen Benold, M.D.
Imagine that there are three entities in our parable: the filling station is the doctor’s office, the auto parts store is the pharmacy, and the garage or repair shop is the hospital.
The Filling Station
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