At the 11th Annual Orthopedic, Spine and Pain Management-Driven ASC Conference, in Chicago, Lisa Rock will give a presentation titled "Tough Coding & Billing Issues for Pain Management."

Brendan Flanigan is the regional manager of gloStream, a full service billing, collections, EHR, and practice management company. Here he shares how to use EHR effectively in spine and orthopedic practices and why the switch makes sense.

If the United States tinkered with Medicare more, reformed tax policies, prioritized healthcare quality and incentivized states to improve care, the healthcare system could save roughly $560 billion over the next decade, according to a report from the Bipartisan Policy Center Health Care Cost Containment Initiative.

Sunni Patterson is President/CEO of RMK Holdings Inc., a medical billing and revenue cycle management company serving physicians, physician groups and other healthcare organizations. Here she discusses ways spine practices can build effective, productive billing processes.

Hospital prices rose 0.2 percent from February to March, according to the most recent Producer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

CMS and ONC will host a "listening session" on billing and coding with electronic health records on May 3, according to an AHA News Now report.

The healthcare industry is not making the amount of progress that is needed for a smooth transition to ICD-10 in October 2014, according to a letter submitted by the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange, an HHS advisor, to the Secretary of HHS.  

As more people demand healthcare price transparency, in light of a recent TIME exposé on high medical charges, a Duke University physician has argued price transparency could "backfire" and cause healthcare costs to rise, according to an article in The Atlantic.

President Barack Obama's $3.77 trillion budget plan for the 2014 fiscal year, if approved, would raise overall federal spending about 6 percent above the current sequester rates, but it would cut Medicare's budget by an estimated $370 billion through reduced payments to pharmaceutical companies and requiring wealthier seniors to pay higher premiums for Medicare Parts B and D, according to a report by Politico.

Doubling back on its push to cut Medicare Advantage payments, CMS announced it would instead increase its rates to Medicare Advantage plans by 3.3 percent next year rather than the 2.3 percent slash it had originally planned.