AIF Announced for the Calendar Year 2022 By Chuck Humphrey, B.A., EMT-B, CAC, CADS* Second Largest Increase Ever! The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that the Ambulance Inflation Factor (AIF) for 2022 is 5.1%. The increase will be applied to the national Medicare Ambulance Fee Schedule with payments...
Excluded Persons = Big Dollars! By Chuck Humphrey, B.A., EMT-B, CAC, CADS* One Person, $371K! The healthcare compliance landscape is littered with all kinds of seemingly small incidents that turn into embarrassing big paybacks and public relations nightmares. Such was recently the case when a large hospital system in California...
How to Overcome Procrastination – Three Magical Words By Jim Riviello Many people procrastinate. It’s easy to delay an important task. Some people postpone an important task to the very last moment—and others end up never doing it at all. Intellectually, we know the task is important and we need...
102 Minutes By Ed Marasco, MPM, CMTE, EMT-P (ret.)* On a clear, sunny, late summer Tuesday in September of 2001, the world we knew at that time changed in ways that we could never have anticipated. Nineteen individuals associated with the Islamic extremist group al Qaeda hijacked four commercial airliners...
Transported for HIGHER Level of Care By Katie Harrison and Chuck Humphrey, QMC Compliance Team If we had a dollar… Here in our QMC billing office, if we had a dollar for every time we have opened a patient care report (PCR) to read the documentation of an ambulance transport...
Just Culture in the world of EMS and how it can change the way you react to an incident. By: Matt Reinhart EMT-P, FP-C Cortex Navigator Ninth Brain Suite The pager of an administrator of a fairly large EMS agency goes off early in the morning alerting him/her that an...
Policy Making & Sausage The Balance Billing Saga Continues in 2021: Part 3 By Ed R. Marasco, MPM, CMTE, EMT-P (Ret.)* As you may recall, the No Surprises Act (NSA) was passed earlier this year and serves as a broader (beyond just medical transport) effort to address surprise and balance...
Policy Making & Sausage The Balance Billing Saga Continues in 2021: Part 2 By Ed R. Marasco, MPM, CMTE, EMT-P (Ret.)* There is an old saying: “The two things you never want to know about how they are made… public policy and sausage.” The ingredients and process can be very...
Policy Making & Sausage The Balance Billing Saga Continues in 2021: Part 1 By Ed R. Marasco, MPM, CMTE, EMT-P (Ret.)* There is an old saying: “The two things you never want to know about how they are made… public policy and sausage.” The ingredients and process can be very...
Musings of a Public Health Emergency- So Far By Chuck Humphrey, B.A., EMT-B, CAC, CADS* Rear-View Mirror Like me, I’m sure that you have taken some time to reflect on what you have learned over the last 15 months since COVID-19 crashed its way into all of our lives. Those...
