"Physical therapy is not a subspecialty of the medical profession and physical therapists are not medical doctors; we are a separate profession that provides a unique service that physicians are unable and untrained to provide."

Letter to the AMA from the APTA, Dec 2009

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Physical Therapy Services Billed by Physicians in Florida Have a High Error Rate

Services billed by physician specialties represented 70% of the dollars incorrectly paid for physical therapy services in the November 2011 Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) Report.

Additionally, past medical review experience has identified high claim error rates when therapy services are billed by physicians.

The most common reasons for an error to be assigned are the following:
  • insufficient documentation
  • failure to meet Medicare’s documentation requirements specific to physical therapy services
  • failure to meet medical necessity guidelines.
Therefore, based on high error rates validated through CERT findings and FCSO’s data analysis, a prepayment medical review edit for physical therapy claims billed by physicians in Florida will be implemented on March 19, 2012.

This prepayment edit will require submission of medical records to support physical therapy services billed by physicians.

More information can be found at the First Coast Service Options web site.

We discussed Medicare Audits here and the high CERT error rate for Chiropractors here.

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Tim Richardson, PT owns a private practice at Medical Arts Rehabilitation, Inc in Palmetto, Florida. The clinic website is at MedicalArtsRehab.com.

Bulletproof Expert Systems: Clinical Decision Support for Physical Therapists in the Outpatient Setting is a manager's workbook with stories, checklists, charts, graphs, tables, and templates describing how you can use paper-based or computerized tools to improve your clinic's Medicare compliance, process adherence and patient outcomes.

Tim has implemented a computerized Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system in his clinic since 2006 that serves as a Reminder, Alerting, Prompting and Predicting CDS using evidence-based tests and measures.

Tim can be reached at
TimRichPT@BulletproofPT.com .

"Make Decisions like Doctors"


Copyright 2007-2010 by Tim Richardson, PT.
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Consistent with the American Physical Therapy Association Vision Statement for Physical Therapy 2020, the American Physical Therapy Association supports exclusive physical therapist ownership and operation of physical therapy services.