How do today’s busy doctors protect their fees from arbitrary discounts and denials?

Gary Lewkovich has some ideas we like and we added a few of our own.

The Key Areas for attacking your fees included :

If you don't challenge the insurance when they claim you are overcharging then they are correct;

Typical Attacks

➢		You are charging too much for each visit [Average Daily Fee];
➢		You are requiring too many visits [frequency] ;
➢		Your office is keeping the patient too long in care [duration] ;
➢		No justification for care based on low value diagnosis;
➢		Total bill is too high;
➢		Duplicate care, i.e. hospital vs. your x-rays;
➢		No active care vs. passive care only;

For a copy of a plan how to 'fight back' contact: amandatrujillo@shawnsteel.com

An emerging forces in personal injury care are Pain Management physicians. Many times these doctors replace traditional surgery used by orthopedists and neurosurgeons for severe spinal injuries.

Pain Management uses a large menu of options to avoid the surgeon's knife. It can give patients and their chiropractor several approaches when the pain turns chronic.

Some techniques involve low level cortisone shots all the way to extended three shot epidural series. The costs can range from the low thousands to tens of thousands for the complex epidural procedures.

How well do they work? It's hard to say because the outcome of pain reduction varies among patients. Our experience is that Pain Management works well perhaps 50% of the time. Still the risks ask are low and the benefits are high. Pain MD's should return the patient back to the referring DC for additional therapy.

At the same time reports are growing that with a small number of Pain doctors, patients can become severely addicted to the drugs. If this is obvious, it is extremely unethical and can cost the lives of patients.

Recently the LA Times published a series of stories [November 2012] naming names of several physicians who have an unusually high number of patient deaths. Most of the patients were addicted to the pills prescribed by the MD, or suffered from overdoses.

How to protect your patient

✓		Carefully check the Pain doctor's reputation with other DC's.
✓		Be sure to ask your patient what medications and what procedures the MD is suggesting.
✓		Personal Injury cases, the MD needs to send the DC an evaluation report so that the patient can choose the most appropriate options.
✓		If the DC detects signs of chemical dependency he needs to discuss this with the MD.

Pain Management, along with orthopedics, neurology can be useful adjuncts to your care program---for the severely injured PI patient. Medicine always entails more patient risks than chiropractic because medicine relies on drugs and surgery.

The Chiropractor is the Generalist in Personal Injury. Pain Management MD's are another branch of medicine, who serve chiropractors'' patients as specialists. Remember the General is in charge.