by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Nov 5, 2019 | Healthcare Payment Policy
Here are links to information about the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule and Quality Payment Program and the Medicare Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) final rules: Medicare Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System: Final Rule and Fact Sheet...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 27, 2019 | Fight the Good Fight, Healthcare Payment Policy
“The wounds with no name” (WWNN) are wounds that are due to trauma (not surgical complications) that never heal, PLUS the chronic ulcers that are NOT diabetic, arterial, venous or pressure related. These two groups (accidental wounds and ulcers which are not obviously...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Mar 25, 2019 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care
Mysterious Sepsis in a Dialysis Patient I have been taking care of a young woman with Type 1 diabetes who lost her kidney transplant about a year ago. She suffers from all the complications of diabetes, and is on home peritoneal dialysis. When I first saw her, she had...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Nov 8, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
I received an email from a physician who expressed how difficult it was to stay updated on the requirements for HBOT documentation. Dr. Helen Gelly has written about this extensively and I have posted blogs about this before. I reviewed the HBOT documentation...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Oct 3, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Nutrition & Wound Healing, Quality Payment Program
What scares me is the fact that I didn’t really pay attention to this until I started developing quality measures for wound care. But now that I’m paying attention, the extent of it is terrifying. In one day I saw three patients who were starving, two of whom had on...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 23, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Nutrition & Wound Healing
On Saturday May 19th I joined Drs. Jay Shah, Noel Oliveira and Rafael Rafols at the Texas Medical Association (TMA) meeting in San Antonio, Texas for the first ever wound care CME event at a TMA meeting. We focused on wound care for the primary care physician, and it...
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. | Jan 17, 2018 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Quality Payment Program
It’s time for a new acronym. You might not have heard of an organization called MedPAC, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. MedPAC has a lot of influence and no power. Or maybe it’s the other way around. It is an independent US federal body...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Oct 20, 2017 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Quality Payment Program
I’ve been blogging about debridement as it relates to the Novitas Local Coverage Determination (LCD) on Wound care issued in final form just recently. (You can find a pdf version of the LCD here). The Novitas LCD states that debridement services can be continued...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Sep 8, 2017 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Nutrition & Wound Healing, Quality Payment Program
What you put IN the patient may be as important as what you put ON them I have been focusing more on nutrition with my patients. Sometimes nutrition is the medicine. This is a wonderful patient over 90 years old who is still driving and mentally alert. He sustained...
