Medicare, Chiropractic, and Checklists

Recently, National Government Services (NGS), the Medicare Administrative Contractor for Illinois, asked their Provider Outreach and Education Advisory Group (POEAG) to reach out and provide a new resource to chiropractic physicians. Our representative on the POEAG requested the ICS provide doctors with this resource.

As most of you already know, chiropractic groups across the country, including the Illinois Chiropractic Society, are working diligently to pass legislation to allow Medicare beneficiaries to have appropriate coverage for services provided by chiropractic physicians. In addition to our efforts with legislators, we want to continue to provide our doctors with tools to help improve documentation across the board.

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To that end, we are providing you with a new tool developed by Medicare specifically for chiropractic physicians: “Medicare Documentation Job Aid for Doctors of Chiropractic.” You can find the tool here.

Although the principal purpose of this tool is to provide guidance on what to provide when supplying requested documentation, the ICS is providing this as a checklist to review your Medicare documentation and find areas in which you can improve. The tool covers the required aspects of Medicare documentation, including patient information, subluxation, initial evaluation and treatment plan, subsequent visits, and general guidelines.

If you are looking for more education for Medicare documentation, the ICS has a number of articles (https://ilchiro.org/tag/medicare/) and courses (live and on-demand) available here (https://catalog.ilchiro.org//category/medicare).