Articles
Decrease Hassles and Costs by Integrating Your Plans' Formularies
This practice reduced its plans' drug requirements to one document physicians can use easily to provide quality care less expensively.
Do-It-Yourself Disease Management
It's amazing what you can accomplish with your PC, some off-the-shelf software and a desire to improve patients' health.
Take-Home Messages From the Academy's Managed Care Forum
From time management to alternative medicine to accounting, the Managed Care Forum of the 1998 AAFP Scientific Assembly offered pearls for family physicians.
What the Hospitalist Movement Means to Family Physicians
The jury's still out on how hospitalists affect patient care, but many family physicians are choosing to give up hospital service before the verdict comes in.
From the Editor
Watch for Changes in Family Practice Management
This issue completes volume 5 of Family Practice Management. In January, we'll be celebrating our fifth anniversary. When we started publication, the Clinton health care reform proposal was filling the news, and our first issue led off with an angry letter from a family…
Letters
Ask FPM
ASK FPM
Utilization management | Creating an office manual for rural health certification
Reimbursement Strategies
REIMBURSEMENT STRATEGIES
What to do about Medicare overpayments | Documenting musculoskeletal findings | ICD-9 codes for lab work | Coding certification for driving
Find Out How Much Your Plans Are Really Paying You
Measuring your collection performance used to be pretty simple: Calculate your collection ratio by dividing payments by gross charges. Now, with a variety of payment arrangements under managed care, it's not so easy. If each health insurance plan pays you using a slightly…
Monitor
MONITOR
GAO: Don't expect HCFA to be ready for year 2000 | More health plans refuse to release HEDIS results | Health care costs see modest increase | Dozens of plans leave Medicare HMO market | First PSO in is first to leave | Preventive services task force reconvenes; three FPs on…
Office Suite
How You Can Keep Your Generation Xers on Staff
Admit it. How many times have you thought that the young people working in your office just don't measure up to you as a young person? How many times have you felt they're irresponsible, poorly educated or unmotivated?
FP Stats
(Small) Trends in Physician Compensation
Physician compensation stayed essentially flat last year for all medical specialties. Median compensation for primary care physicians rose just 0.86 percent to $135,791 in 1997. Median compensation for all other specialists dropped 0.48 percent to $220,476.