by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 22, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Quality Payment Program
Nearly 200 years ago, the brilliant French historian Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the fledgling United States and observed that in lieu of hereditary wealth and aristocracy, we were building a society on individualism, market capitalism, and honoring the...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 11, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Quality Payment Program
Ernest Codman, an 1895 Harvard Medical School graduate, became a surgeon at the turn of the 20th century. He spent his life on a crusade to reform surgical practice and medical care, formulating what he called the “end result system” in which he...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 8, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Quality Payment Program
My Dad’s definition of mixed emotions was watching your mother in law drive off a cliff in your new car. (Truth be told, his mother in law adored him and vice versa.) There’s a lot of back and forth about the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), and it’s hard...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 25, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Lymphatic Imaging & Lymphedema, Quality Payment Program
It’s interesting that patients are often less worried about their ulcerations than they are their edema, and in some ways it’s harder to treat. I am tormented by what we don’t understand about leg edema that we currently have the power to know. The US Wound Registry...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 12, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Quality Payment Program
Re-posted with permission from Today’s Wound Clinic. Have you ever heard of a surgeon offering a warranty on a procedure? I can hardly get a warranty on a home appliance repair. A warranty is not the legal term for what Geisinger offers patients after a hip...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Mar 27, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Quality Payment Program
There’s a scene in “Men in Black” where Jay panics about a looming crisis, but Kay tells him that there’s always an intergalactic plague threatening to destroy the earth, and that the only way people get on with life is if they don’t know about it. Truthfully, the...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Mar 1, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, Quality Payment Program
Yesterday a friend who practices hyperbaric medicine called me about a reimbursement question because she had just read the Novitas LCD on the subject. I told her that the Novitas LCD was the least of our problems. HBOT utilization is down 50% across the USA. Listed...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 19, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, Quality Payment Program
Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine has published an update on the Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Registry – “Driving Quality and Demonstrating Compliance.” The HBOTR is one of the specialty registries sponsored by the US Wound Registry (USWR). The HBOTR could be used...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 16, 2018 | Cassandra Chronicles: Regulatory and Coverage Policy, Pressure Cooker: Rethinking Pressure Ulcers, Quality Payment Program, US Wound Registry
Helen Gelly recently blogged about the HCC methodology that CMS uses to create risk adjustments and why it is a really big deal for wound care practitioners. Last year “Minuteman Health,” a Massachusetts based insurance company, filed a lawsuit in federal court...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jan 30, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Quality Payment Program
Our last guest post by the esteemed Dr. Helen Gelly, CEO of HyperbaRXS in Atlanta, GA, was so popular that I just had to have her back in this space! As always, her insights are both incisive and much-needed. Enjoy! –CF It has been said that “you can’t manage...
