In response to CMS’s release of a list of its all physicians and other healthcare professionals registered in its Provider Enrollment, Chain and Ownership System (PECOS) database, Fastrack Healthcare Systems Inc. has provided an automated way to help its users to ensure referral partners are registered.
HME providers must ensure physicians and other referring healthcare professionals such as nurse practitioners, physician assistants, social workers, psychologists, and physical therapists are registered in PECOS before the April 5 deadline. Otherwise, DME claims coming from those referral sources will not be approved by Medicare.
However, the list CMS unveiled last week for providers to check is an unwieldy PDF file that is more than 13,500 pages long and contains nearly 800,000 listings, alphabetized by surname. (The list will be updated on a monthly basis, and can be downloaded as a PDF file from CMS at http://www.cms.hhs.gov/MedicareProviderSupEnroll/Downloads/OrderingReferringReport.pdf.)
To ease the process, Fastrack has automated the downloading of the PECOS list from within its system to automatically compare the enrolled physicians with the physicians in its users’ database. If a physician is on CMS’s list, his or her record in the provider’s database is marked as being PECOS-enrolled. Those physicians not in the PECOS database will appear on a Fastrack report that the provider can use to follow-up with the physicians.
Fastrack’s system also provides a count of the number of physicians found to be enrolled and those not enrolled. Each time CMS updates its list, Fastrack users can run the count.
“To ensure that orders are not being processed after April 1st, Fastrack has added a warning in order entry, direct billing, RX entry, etc. to alert the user that the physician is not PECOS enrolled,” says Spencer Kay, President of Fastrack. “Fastrack hopes to eliminate orders from being billed to Medicare that will be denied due to a physician not being enrolled as well as help our clients be pro-active in encouraging physicians to enroll.”
The service available to Fastrack HME, Infusion Pharmacy and Home Care Agency users as a free download available from their client website.