The Best Advice for New Physician/Nurse Practitioner Graduates
For Clinicians Don’t overspend. My first year in private practice, Mrs. Dr. Tom, my new son and I really put our credit card through its paces. We had just moved to a new town and, despite a quarter of a million dollars in education debt, we spent! We bought a much bigger home […]
Success Codes
For Organizations and Clinicians. New to risk coding? Check out my succinct, value-packed, yet incredibly easy-to-understand risk adjustment factor (RAF) post for absolutely everything you need to know to be successful in one easy bite. It’s the only primer on the web written by a PCP who’s been there/done that—and been wildly successful at doing it. […]
Bulletproof
How do you make yourself impervious to depression, disengagement, burnout? Impervious to suicide? What’s the secret? Relationships. Make sure you practice where you have the time to nurture relationships. For co-workers, you need a trusting environment. For patients, you need time without distractions. […]
Your Greatest Obstacle to Medicare Advantage Success
Greed. Wanting too much, too fast. This is the greatest obstacle to a high-performing shared-risk care system. Be careful scaling anything up too quickly—pool size, care management— overreaching is your greatest enemy. It’s the close, trusting relationship with your patients that generates the real value in such a system. That takes […]
Will Travel
One Thing You Absolutely MUST Know About the Difference Between Medicare and Medicare Advantage. But Probably Don’t Medicare will not cover your healthcare expenses outside of the United States. Medicare Advantage will. (yes, really) More ways to get the most out of your Medicare benefits here.
Take Care of Yourself
“Tom, people are always going to have babies, they’re always going to get sick, they’re always going to get old, they’re always going to die. And they’re always going to need someone to take care of them. Once there’s no more money, the businessmen are going to leave. Then it’s just you and […]
Success Codes—The Basics
Success in Medicare Advantage is simple: Gather a panel of patients Efficiently provide them the most beneficial care tailored for them Mind your coding The risk coding part is easy. I’m a big one for making sure I capture and submit every appropriate risk code myself. You don’t need to be […]
How to Find the Best Clinical Job
My first employment contract: “Your compensation will consist of your total collections minus 1/4 of the total expenses of the practice. The resulting number will be divided by 2—$90,000 minimum.” Our first NP contract: “Your total compensation will consist of $60,000 per year plus 10% of your collections above […]
Medicare Advantage Lessons Learned
Congratulations. Your value has just increased exponentially. Having read the post about RAF scores, and their timing, you now know that, as the patient’s personal clinician, you’re both the major source of risk-code data and the most effective source of cost control. In other words, under these plans the primary driver of […]
How to Save Money on Your Medication
My greatest professional satisfaction comes in my nursing home practice-I work with great people. Patients I’ve never met before are admitted to my service with a stunning number of individual medications—20-25 or more. Given that most of the medications are given multiple times daily, many take 50 or 60 individual pills a […]