AVOID A 4% MEDICARE PENALTY IN 2019! The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS’) new Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) reporting year began Jan. 1, 2017. In order for doctors to avoid penalties for failure to report, they must take steps before December 31.
Doctors who do not report in 2017 and are not exempt will be assessed a 4% penalty on their Medicare reimbursements in 2019. However, this can be avoided but reporting ANY data this year. You can avoid the penalty by reporting just one Clinical Practice Improvement Activity or one Quality Measure for one patient you see before December 31, 2017. For more information, visit the AOA website. Besides the AOA, CMS and your practice management software vendor are other good resources.
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Tricare is changing their enrollment period from a fiscal year that used to reset on October 1 to a calendar year, beginning January 1, 2018. This means that your Tricare patients’ deductibles will now start over again each January rather than October. For more information, please visit the Tricare website: https://tricare.mil/CoveredServices/BenefitUpdates/Archives/10_12_17_Changes_FY2CY
IMPORTANT UPDATE ON TRICARE EAST: Last minute information is looking like EyeMed or Tricare may have given optometrists in the new Tricare East region incorrect information and that doctors do not have to be part of EyeMed’s network to be Tricare providers. If this is true, thousands of doctors signed unnecessary contracts to take reduced fees! Go to https://optometricbilling.com/tricare-eyemed
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New Medicare cards with new patient ID numbers are coming next year. Be ready! In order to prevent identity theft, Medicare will stop using patients’ social security numbers as part of their ID starting in 2018. Instead, all Medicare patients will be issued a new Medicare beneficiary identifier (MBI), and Medicare will start mailing out new cards with the new number in April of 2018. This means that starting next April, our offices should start asking Medicare enrollees for a copy of their new card and begin updating their software with the new ID numbers. Medicare plans to honor both ID numbers on claims until the end of 2019, after which they will only accept claims with the new MBIs. Please go to the CMS website for more information for providers about this upcoming change.
Go to https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/New-Medicare-Card/index.html.
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ROUTINE VISION MERGER
UPDATE: The merger was ratified on December 1, so officially both Davis and Superior are now combined under the same Centerbridge/Highmark corporate umbrella. However, we talked to a company representative and learned that for now both companies will continue to operate independently with “business as usual.” Therefore, providers can expect no immediate change with the completion of the sale. While the company emphasized there was currently no official date for any changes, they did concede that these would be coming at some point in the future and advised us that offices should be looking for a fax which would outline these changes when that time comes.
Have you heard that Davis and Superior are merging? Centerbridge Partners, owned by Highmark, who already owned Superior, is in the process of purchasing Davis Vision and plans to merge the two companies. Reports indicate that the sale should be final somewhere near the end of the year. It’s too early to know what this will mean to providers, but look for more information in the months to come.
