New reports look at family medicine office visit billing

If you’re a family physician and you provide office visits to Medicare patients, you may soon receive a comparative billing report (CBR) that analyzes your billing patterns for those services. A CBR is considered an educational resource and tool for possible improvement. It compares your practice’s billing behavior with those of physicians offering similar services in your state, your specialty, or nationwide. It is not an indication or precursor to an audit.

If you receive a CBR on office visits, it is because your Medicare billing patterns differ from those of peers. Your CBR will present a statistical analysis of how you bill office visit codes versus how others do it. Each CBR is unique to the individual physician to whom it is sent and is not publicly available.

You do not have to respond to a CBR. However, you are encouraged to carefully review the report. You may want to check your records against Medicare’s data and review Medicare guidelines to ensure compliance. If you have specific billing or coding questions, you should contact your Medicare Administrative Contractor.

If you want more information, there is a free webinar about CBRs on Feb. 28, at 3 p.m. EST for which you can register online. Other sources of information include a sample CBR with mock data and a list of frequently asked questions.

– Kent Moore, Senior Strategist for Physician Payment at the American Academy of Family Physicians