Articles
The Stark Truth About the Stark Law: Part I
The law addresses a wide range of services and financial relationships. Find out whether it affects you.
How to Boost Your Bottom Line With an Office Procedure
Adding joint and soft-tissue injection to your practice can pay off in more ways than one.
Family Medicine Takes Center Stage
As part of the Future of Family Medicine project, the specialty put itself under a glaring spotlight to see where it currently stands.
Correction
The sample performance record in “Tracking Performance” [Ask FPM, September 2003, page 73] should have included a space for the employee’s initials rather than the employer’s. When employees initial the record, they acknowledge they have seen and understood their employers…
From the Editor
The First Step Toward the Future of Family Medicine
Too much bad stuff is happening in health care and to the health care system today to give optimists an easy time. The skyrocketing cost of care is bad enough, but it’s a minor, secondary problem compared with our society’s endless, rapacious appetite for more and fancier care…
Letters
Getting Paid
How to Opt Out of Medicare
Leaving Medicare behind may be tempting, but make sure to look before you leap.
Coding & Documentation
CODING & DOCUMENTATION
Modifiers -51 & -59 | Hospital consultation codes | Anaphylactic shock | Clarification
Monitor
MONITOR
HIPAA: Time is on your side | Delegates vote for a name change | How many colonoscopies does it take to get privileges? | Waiving the right to sue | Unsatisfactory report card | Physician recruitment
Improving Patient Care
When Your Patients Are in Mourning
This patient handout will help prevent health crises in mourning patients and demonstrate that you care.
Practice Diary
PRACTICE DIARY
It’s said that doctors’ children never have easy-to-diagnose diseases, and now I know why. Over a year ago, my teenage daughter, Margot, first complained of mild discomfort in her right ankle. She had had assorted sports injuries throughout middle school and high school, but…
Ask FPM
ASK FPM
Hiring an office assistant | Dictation islands | Delegating to MAs | Re-signing bonuses