Medicare pay cuts,

You’re Hearing Both Good & Bad Advice

Medicare’s 2021payment reduction should never be an excuse for an EMR to raise prices.  But that is exactly what’s happening.

We’ve all heard the pitch, “Make up the Medicare pay cuts by treating more patients”, (and try not to notice the higher monthly fees).

Our perspective:

1. The same people who today advise, “fix the problem by treating more patients”, just last year they were lamenting that therapist burnout was our industry’s top crisis.
2. “Therapist burnout” is the result of slow, low-tech EMR that burdens therapists with endless documentation homework. Obviously, adding even more treatments would make burnout even worse.

Adding more patients isn’t the solution

When you can’t sign the notes you already have

We know………You “get it”.  Systems 4PT recently conducted an industry survey asking therapists:

If you had to choose one:

• Would you rather treat 10% more patients?
• Or would you rather be reimbursed 10% more for the patients you already treat?

Until your practice is fairly paid,

Increasing expenses in hopes of adding more patients is the wrong priority.

It is not surprising that 98% of therapists selected the second option.  It’s not a difficult concept.

No one debates that collections are meaningfully compromised when EMR and therapy billing are different programs, with different names, in different databases.  We should all be very suspicious of EMRs whose non-integrated billing collects 10% less than it should, and whose solution to the pay cuts is that you and your staff need to pay higher fees and work longer days.

The right way to fix Medicare’s pay cuts

Is to modernize your billing and collect 10% more.

As stated in our prior blogs, Systems 4PT saw the pay cuts coming.  For years we have been urgently working on solutions.

For example, most Systems 4PT practices qualified for the 2021 MIPS Bonus (based on 2019 performance).  For these Systems4PT practices, the 2021 Medicare pay cuts are not 9%, not 4%, we have reduced the pay cuts to ½ of 1%.

By the way, Systems 4PT provides QCDR MIPS submission at no extra charge.

Systems 4PT’s perspective is optimistic, yes, even enthusiastic

Healthcare reform is only a problem if you don’t change when the rules change

It’s easy to discern which EMR providers are focused on your practice’s successful future, vs. which EMR’s top priority is increasing your fees:

• The 2021 MIPS bonus is free money. And It nearly offsets the entire Medicare fee cuts.
• Practice owners are rejecting non-integrated billing, seeking out modern technologies that increase collections 10% – 13%.
• They are finding those new technologies that eliminate homework and the resulting therapist burnout
• Spending more time treating and less time typing
• And rather than adding new monthly EMR fees, they are lowering their EMR & billing costs by 35%

Systems 4PT understands our role.  We’re here to help you achieve your goals.

No slick marketing.  No hidden fees.  No bewildering advice about adding more patients to therapists who don’t have time to sign the notes they already have.

We’d like to help you offset the lower Medicare fee schedule.

You deserve to be optimistic as well.

Sign Up for a Free Demo