Greetings, Fellow Doctors and Coders:

 

About the Case of the Week (or lack thereof)

Sorry about neglecting the Case of the Week, these past several weeks (I appreciate all the emails saying, "Where's the case?"), but I've been busy.  For the past two months, I have been diligently working to systematically update all of our web-based E/M coding courses.  All modules have now been re-recorded to incorporate the most recent statistics and rule changes and generally freshened up a bit.    With the sheer volume of courses on our site, it took a bit of doing to get this job completed.  Now that I'm done, I will try to resume Case of the Week as soon as possible.  

 

New Content: 1995 E/M Guidelines

 If that wasn't enough to keep me busy over the summer, we finally took the plunge to incorporate the 1995 guidelines into the E/M University curriculum.  I myself use the 1995 rules quite often in practice so I felt we had to make this option available to our subscribers as well.  So, starting September 1, 2011, each course will have two versions: one with the 1995 guidelines and one with the 1997 guidelines.  If you do the math, this basically doubles our course content.

 

Observation Care and a Bigger, Bolder Basic Course

In addition to the changes mentioned above, we will be adding a new course entitled, "Observation Care Services" which will explain the recent changes in observation care services, including when to use newly added subsequent observation care codes.  The Basic Course has also been totally re-built from the ground up to incorporate both the 1995 and 1997 guidelines and to include the TrailBlazer medical decision-making rules in addition to the standard rules.

 

TrailBlazer Keeps Changing Their Rules

 If  you live in Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma or Texas, we have you covered.  Your Medicare carrier (TrailBlazer) keeps changing the states they cover as well as their rules.  We have updated all the courses (including the new 1995 versions) to reflect these new rules.  In addition, all of our content (even the Resident Course and The Faculty Course) will be available in the TrailBlazer version.

 

MORE CME and CEU Credit

More content means more CME and CEU credit.  We anticipate being able to offer over 70 hours of AMA Category 1 CME credit for our updated curriculum along with up to 37 AAPC CEUs (application is currently pending). 

 

It All Starts September 1, 2011

 Current registrants will have automatic access to our updated content, so you don't have to do anything different if you are already a subscriber (and you don't have to wait until September to sign up). 

 

Thanks for your support,

 

Peter R.  Jensen, MD, CPC