While the heart of your physical therapy practice is your core value of providing care and recovery for your patients, the reality is that payment is what makes all of that possible. Even though a small amount of the care you offer to your PT patients will be paid by them or by family members, a greater percentage of your revenue will come from insurance programs. For most physical therapy practices, Medicare represents a significant amount of that part of your revenue.

One aspect of dealing with the government in the Medicare program is that they will routinely send around Medicare recovery audit contractors. Their job is to research and fix any mistakes in payments by Medicare since the last audit. It is a fact of life when you are dealing with the Medicare program that the claims you send it will be reviewed by a PT practice Medicare audit.
It is an ongoing challenge for anyone who runs a physical therapy practice to keep the levels of care offered to patients at a high level while contending with increasing costs coming from all quarters. With the overhead of maintaining a good profile for reimbursements with insurance companies and Medicare becoming more complicated each year, the investment in time and effort in being prepared for such things as a Medicare audit represents a measurable setback to the profitability of the practice.

There is little question that the best way to prepare your office for a PT practice Medicare audit is to take advantage of physical therapy documentation software so that your electronic medical records are fully automated long before the audit occurs. Your PT documentation software should enable you to stay up to date on changes in insurance and Medicare requirements.
If you are still in the selection- or decision-making process about your PT practice documentation software, being aware of the advantages such automation can provide for you to prepare for Medicare audits can help refine your decision. Be sure that software solution offers the following features and support…

• Built-in alerts for more compliant documentation
• Built-in clinical coding initiative edits so that billing goes out clean and doesn’t raise red flags
• Available Outcome Measurement tests required by Medicare
• A Plan of Care report that organizes the certifications/recerts that must be sent to and signed and returned by referring MD

A good PT practice documentation software program is a system that serves to lead your therapists through the documentation process and that assures that all documentation is completed thoroughly and correctly. With this kind of software intelligence in place, the preparation process for a Medicare audit becomes routine and no longer a cause for concern. This kind of automation should not be available to just large physical therapy operations as the PT documentation software services that will make your final cut offer a solution that is scalable so a right fit for a smaller practice can be customized as well.

"We have PT's working out of patient homes and multiple locations. This made managing paper documentation rather difficult. It just took a couple weeks for our PT's to get used to the system and now it has streamlined our efforts to a centralized website where we can manage all charts, saving time and paper. We are also much more professional looking. Efax is awesome, and keeps us compliant with alerts for progress notes, etc. for Medicare."  Jim Prussack, In-Home Physical Therapy Services