This summer we will be spending 3 days of intense coding and practice management work on the beach. I have decided to combine our annual Advanced Coding Growth Strategies class with a new 6 hour program Practice Growth Strategies. All of that combined with a summer beach vacation. Here's what we will do:

The course will be 7:30-12:30 every morning for 3 days. These 12+ hours will be spent doing the following items:

Advanced Coding Growth Strategies

Our main goal in the "advanced" program is to address complex office visits that are difficult to code, those types of patients that you cannot quickly and accurately identify and code accordingly. Those patient encounters where risk and nature of the presenting problem are difficult to define and situations where it is easy to forget important documentation.

• Monthly Codes: Case Management, Transitional Care, Chronic care templates, EMR, documenting.
• Detailed Exam Templates (what is a detailed exam anyways?)
• Templates for outpatient, inpatient, newborns, well visits, and case management (hospice, nursing home, home health)
• Get to know your Regional Medicare Carrier
• Well Visits and Sick Visits (when, why, and how)
• Coding pitfalls and traps (it's not always a 99214!)
• Documenting 'Normal' (sometimes that's not good enough)
• Examples, examples, examples!

Practice Growth Strategies

We developed a Practice Growth Strategies video several years ago. It was a very popular product, but it's time for an update. Since that time I've learned a tremendous amount of things that I think need to be added or updated to the course. The course will focus on how to identify and improve efficiency in these critical areas:

• Scheduling and Patient Flow (there is a better way)
• Decreasing your no-show rate (O brother where are thou?)
• Hiring and Firing (don't wait too long for either one)
• Wages, salaries, and benefits (how to get what you pay for)
• Staff management and development
• Non-physician providers (when, why, and how)
• Effective EMR implementation
• Essentials of Meaningful Use (how do I get my money?)
• Business growth strategies
• Automating processes (did I forget again?)
• Help through the slow season (if you have one)
• Marketing (investing resources or wasting my money?)
• Practice Analysis and Benchmarking (Am I doing well or not?)
• After Hours and Weekends
• Reports to know and love
• Checking out and collecting money
• Systems to ensure patient follow-up care
• Patient Portals
• Patients and mobile devices (is there an app for that?)