Medicare Statistics
Have you ever wondered how you rate against other providers in the Medicare world? Good news, Medicare releases massive databases that provide statistics for health care providers around the nation, and the Wall Street Journal is the latest news source that has created an online search tool for those databases.
Designed as a tool for transparency, http://graphics.wsj.com/medicare-billing/ can also be used to determine your own usage levels. Simply key in your name, specialty and location to view your results. The results will include data from 2012, 2013 and 2014; and information regarding your number of patients, total payments and payments per patient are provided. Wall Street Journal then takes that data and compares your Medicare statistics to your peers both in Illinois and nationally.
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The actual purpose is to provide patients with full transparency regarding providers. However, we see this as a tool that chiropractic physicians can utilize to help determine how they compare to other providers. For example, if you rank in the upper 80th percentile in payments per patient, then you may be more likely to be identified as an audit risk.
Even more importantly, you can see where you rank with the primary chiropractic manipulation codes (9894x) nationally. Are you in the highest percentile for 98942, then you may be a high audit risk.
