Join us each week for our FAQ Friday. This week we have a question from one of our HITECH Answers members on ePrescribing..
Question: I have installed an EHR in my office and just received the approval number to begin ePrescribing. What happens if I don’t get 10 eRx’s in before June 30th for medicare patients. I do a lot of renewals now by fax. The drug stores fax the renewals in and the physician just signs them and faxes them back. There are very few patients that wait until they have an appointment anymore to get a Rx filled. So, the ability to fill a script on a patient visit and add that to the bill with the G8553 code is very much diminished.
Answer: CMS is very specific/rigid on the requirement of 10 scripts by June 30th. The script must be created as a result of an actual patient encounter, and be electronically sent to a pharmacy and not Faxed. As of now the June 30th date is a fixed end date.
The AMA has written to CMS to ask for a reconsideration of the date on behalf of its members.
The positive to the CMS e-Prescribing requirement is that they are very generous on the types of encounters that you can count when you add the G8553. CMS allows the following:
The prescriber must identify whether the encounter is an applicable case using the following denominator codes: 90801, 90802, 90804, 90805, 90806, 90807, 90808, 90809, 90862, 92002, 92004, 92012, 92014, 96150, 96150, 96151, 96152, 99201, 99202, 99203, 99204, 99205, 99211, 99212, 99213, 99214, 99215, 99304, 99305, 99306, 99307, 99308, 99309, 99310, 99315, 99316, 99324, 99325, 99326, 99327, 99328, 99334, 99335, 99336, 99337, 99341, 99342, 99343, 99344, 99345, 99347, 99348, 99349, 99350, G0101, G0108, G0109
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