Three Tips for Framing Art Prints

An art print or poster will create an elegant accent piece for your home or office décor. First, figure out where you want to hang a piece of art so you know the correct size to order. Next, choose a piece of art that fits your personal style and the decorating style of the room. When choosing a frame or moulding for your artwork, there are three simple rules to keep in mind to frame like a pro.

1. Choose a frame that matches the style of the artwork.

Modern prints or posters, such as the Campbell's Soup series by Andy Warhol or Ascending and Descending by M.C. Escher, look best in standard frames with simple lines. Ornate mouldings may look too old-fashioned with modern art prints. Traditional art prints, such as the Creation of Adam by Michelangelo Buonarroti or The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, will look fabulous in ornate frames. However, traditional artworks also work with standard frames.

2. The frame should complement the colors in the art print.

Always select a frame that is darker than the poster or art print. It should also be darker than the wall, unless you are hanging a white frame on a dark wall for a stark contrast. A frame should never match the dominant color in a print, with one exception. When framing a piece of art that is mostly black, you can choose a black frame, as long as you use a mat to separate the moulding from the artwork. Art with warm hues can be framed in gold, black or wooden frames. Art with cool hues can be framed in black, silver or light-colored wooden frames.

3. Stick with the same interior design style as the rest of the room.

Rooms decorated with modern furniture and accessories look great with sleek, simple and standard frames. A beautiful silver frame will really pop in a room decorated with cool hues. A print framed with a plain black will add a touch of elegance. Anything too decorative may look out of place. Decorative frames will look great in rooms decorated with a timeless or traditional design. For homes decorated with country-themed accessories, try an oak or another wooden frame.

A framed art print can serve as the focal point in a well-decorated home or office. Choosing the right mouldings for prints or posters will show that you have an eye for decorating and style.

Contribution Limits of 401(K)

The 401(k) retirement plan is a great retirement account for the employees available at present. The plan allows the employees to collect certain amount of money during their career by saving money to get reasonable amount as pension for the retirement life. The contribution limits of the 401(k) plan include catch-up limits, total contribution limits, pre-tax and the limits applicable to the highly-paid employees. There are certain 401(k) maximums which do not allow exceeding certain amount while making contributions to the account. The maximum money you can contribute to the account depends up on the age of the employee.

In a 401(k) plan, it is crucial to remember that the contribution limit will change each year. The maximum limit to contribute is based on the living costs of the person in the previous year. The contribution limits are normally announced during mid October. The contribution maximum of 2011 is same as that of the last two years and the limit is $16,500 per year. The maximum may be increased in next year because the US government recalculates the limitation regularly due to the inflation. The rate normally increased is $500 each year.

The applicants of 401(k) plan who are eligible for additional contributions are the employees of more than 50 years of age and this kind of contribution is known as the catch-up limit. The catch-up amount is also limited by the maximums and the present maximum contribution limit is $5,500. Again this rate is also recalculated because of the economic changes, mainly due to inflation and the increasing rate here also is $500. Catch-ups help the employee to increase the funds in their account during the last ten years of the pre-retirement. This contribution limit is useful for a person who applied for the 401(k) plan at a later age.

The employee can decide whether to provide after tax or pre-tax contribution. If the person is applying for after tax contribution, then he/she should apply for Roth 401(k) program. Both after tax and pre-tax accounts can be created by the employee, if required. But the contribution limits of both accounts together should not exceed the amount mentioned in the 401(k) maximums. In other words, the yearly contributions to both of these accounts should not go beyond the limit of $16,500. If the employee is above the age of 50 and creates catch ups, then the amount contributed to both of the accounts together should not go beyond $22,000.

Never mix up because if the amount exceeds the contribution limits, then you have to pay heavy taxes. If you have exceeded the maximum contribution limits of 401(k), then you have to withdraw additional amount by April 15th of next year. This plan is available for both self-employed and hired employees. In the case of hired employees, the contributions are automatically deducted from the salary. But in case of self-employed people, you have to apply for a solo plan known as the Individual K.

The Medical Billing Process

Preregistration - The medical billing process begins at the point of contact from the prospective patient. Preregistration is the first step in the Medical billing process and the revenue cycle. It is the time to gather demographic and insurance information. This information is vital to the successful adjudication of your medical claims and vital to the financial success of your practice. This step in the billing process has several front end processes. Failure to address these front end processes can and will cost your practice time and money.

Demographics - Demographic information is the patient's personal information. It includes the patient name, address, phone number, and work phone number, date of birth, gender and social security number. This information will be important when communicating with the insurance company for claims follow up and future contact with the patient. Demographic information is personal and needs to be protected in order to comply with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) rules and regulations.

Insurance Information - The preregistration step is also the time to gather insurance information. Since this is how your practice will get paid for its services, it is worth taking extra time at this front end process and make certain this information is captured accurately. The name of the insurance company, the name of the insured if the insured is not the patient, type of policy, the ID number and the phone number for the insurance company are critical pieces of information. If you can obtain the mailing address for claims, it would be advantageous to do so at this time. Each piece of insurance information is vital to successful adjudication of the claim.

Compliance with insurance company policies - By obtaining the insurance information before your patient arrives for their first appointment, your practice will be able to verify eligibility and benefits, obtain the required authorization, obtain proper referrals and verify co pay and deductible information. The following information is critical to the billing and collections process and to the success of your practice. I want to stress that it is of the utmost importance to the practice for this information to be accurate. Failures to obtain proper referrals, precertification or preauthorization are all causes for denied claims. Collecting the co pay at the time of visit will save you the cost of printing a statement, envelope and postage and also the man hours to do follow up on a ten dollar balance.

Be Precise and Accurate - Since your staff has taken the time to obtain the demographic and insurance information, they should also take the time to enter this information accurately into you computer system. A couple of extra minutes spent on entering this information correctly will save time and money trying to fix mistakes and re-submitting rejected or denied claims. It is frustrating to say the least for a claim to be rejected or denied because of an incorrect digit in an id number or a patient name that is misspelled.

The cost of inaccurate information - Inaccurate demographic and insurance information is costly to your practice. It leads to rejected and denied claims. When claims are rejected or denied, it takes time or man-hours to research the denial reason, correct the inaccurate information and resubmit the claim. Inaccurate information leads to increase labor and resources to adjudicate the claim and delays the cash flow of your practice. It substantially can impact you bottom line.

Medical Billing And Coding Salary And Hourly Rate Factors - What You Should Know

If you're thinking about entering the medical billing and coding field there are a number of things you'll want to check out. Of course you're interested in the kind of salary or hourly rate you can expect and that will depend a lot on a few factors.

First of all it'll depend on where you live. Are you living in a big city where there is a lot of competition among billing services or do many other doctor's offices and health care facilities hire their own medical billers, coders, assistants and specialists? If you live in an area where the economy is good and the cost of living is higher you would get a higher entry level salary.

Medical billers, medical coders and medical insurance specialists (who usually know how to bill and code) will find that salaries will vary depending on whether you work in a private clinic, doctor's office, hospital, healthcare facility, dental office or for a billing service or insurance company. Salaries can vary quite a bit actually so this will take a little research in your own community to see where the salaries run higher.

Also any education you have that relates to medical billing and coding will give you a big boost. Whether it's in the medical billing and coding area or related areas. Medical terminology can be very useful as can other types of jobs.

In the recent past medical billers and coders have made between $35,000 and $45,000 and up. This will depend on how much education or training, related job experience, and how long you've been with your employer if in the same field.

So you can see there are many factors to consider when determining the salary or hourly rate for medical billers and coders.

The best thing to do is make a few phone calls to medical billing services in your hometown or closest city and see what kind of salaries they offer to medical billers or coders. You can usually find out a lot by contacting the human resources departments. Try calling some of the larger doctors' offices too and talk to the office manager. They're usually quite willing to tell you starting salaries and also the potential for getting a job there in the future. Continue to research online if you need medical billing or medical coding training (you can study these separately) or education and focus on one or the other or both.

Don't Be Distracted by the Shiny Objects of EMR and HITECH Incentives

One of the blogs that I like to read, The Healthcare IT Guy, posted some good thoughts last week about the final MU rules for EMR and what physicians should do next. I liked his advice, which included:

"Don't be in a hurry to make an EMR/EHR decision because of incentive payments; even if you start in 2012 you'll be eligible for full payments from Medicare ($44k over 5 years) and you can start as late as 2016 to get full payments from Medicaid ($66k+ over 5 years). If you're making EHR/EMR decisions based on other business benefits and not incentive payments then you should continue that research and decision-making process." "Do be in a hurry to use technology that helps with office automation first (like document management, patient relationship management, etc.). General office automation technology won't qualify you for incentive payments but it will help reduce your costs and you'll run your business better. If you use the proper technology you save more in one year than you'll get back from incentive payments in 5 years."

His second point is especially important, from my point of view. Too often, we are entranced by the latest idea to generate revenue or build business, and we're distracted from the tried and true techniques for maximizing revenue we've already brought in the door.

A doctor I know has a good expression for it: "Stepping over dollars to pick up pennies."

A good example of this is that $44,000 incentive, which every EMR company is waving in your face. The $44,000 is a tantalizing figure, no doubt about it. But did you realize that you could earn a great deal more than that through improved medical billing and collections?

Let's start with the fact that it's not uncommon for medical practices to report a gross collection rate of 60 percent or less, according to The Physician Billing Process: 12 Potholes to Avoid in the Road to Getting Paid. That means for every $1 of services billed, the physician receives only 60 cents.

Then, consider the impact of denials: Gross charges denied by payers have grown over the last decade to 14-18% of all charges. That translates to $118,800 of lost revenue for the typical primary care physician. Some other food for thought:

Denied, rejected, resubmitted and underpaid claims can cost you as much as $100,000 per month according to the AMA. Your practice could be losing more than $75,000 per year in denied claims that are never resubmitted, based on multiple studies confirming that many practices do not resubmit up to 50% of their denied claims. Underpayment of approved claims has historically been as much as 35% lower than the contract amount.

What all of this means is that you could be bringing more money to your bottom line-without adding a single new patient or working another hour longer-or chasing the EMR incentive. Naturally, we believe the best way to do this is by fully utilizing the best possible medical billing software and insurance claims processing best practices to insure that your claims are clean, your appeals submitted and collections are as high as possible. And if you do those things, you will not only put more in your pocket than you will with the HITECH incentives, but you will have a better-run practice overall, as The Healthcare IT Guy mentioned.

I'm not saying you should ignore EMRs and other technology. You should certainly seriously consider an EMR for your practice, if it makes sense for your practice.

We just don't want you to be distracted by that shiny object and miss out on money you've already earned-and deserve.

Because we believe you deserve the dollars...as well as the pennies.

Leaders Must Direct Clearly

How can anyone go on to be a great leader if he cannot clearly, concisely and directly communicate what his vision, goals and plans for an organization are? Those individuals in leadership who fail to recognize how important getting others involved and motivated is, rarely have much of an opportunity to effectively lead or accomplish even the loftiest and most important goals. Lakshmi Mittal stated, "When people can see which direction the leaders are going in, it becomes easier to motivate them." Ineffective individuals in leadership positions invariably lack the clarity of purpose, the transparency, and often the self - confidence, that would permit them to effectively communicate both plans and reasons, in order to motivate and mobilize others to action, commitment, involvement and even caring.

1. How important are motivational skills to leadership? In my over three decades of identifying, qualifying, motivating, training, developing and consulting to well over a thousand individuals in positions of leadership, I have become convinced that no other single trait or quality is as essential as motivation. Trainers can teach people many of the skills needed to be an effective leader, but motivation takes not only a keen understanding, but also the positive attitude, commitment, people skills, caring, the desire to create value, and absolute integrity. Simply using motivational rhetoric rarely has any long - term impact, and while the words may rally the troops, unless they ring true and are believable, are often ignored or forgotten. People watch not only what someone says, but whether his actions are in alignment with his words. In order to truly motivate, others must believe that a leader really cares, has an important message, is transparent, honest, trustworthy, and most importantly, is someone they would be proud to and want to follow. That is true and absolute motivation!

2. Ben Feldman, one of the foremost insurance salespersons of the early to mid - twentieth century, defined his success this way, "One percent technical knowledge and ninety - nine percent understanding human nature." Most people want to be uplifted, made to feel good about something, want to care, yet often need someone else to give them the emotional support and motivate them to do more. It is generally more expedient to give up than to persevere, yet it is precisely that persistence that often creates greatness, and the makes the most difference. A great leader understands that his message must be clear, and that he must focus on goals and needs.

There is no place in effective leadership for foggy focused leaders. True leaders understand what they need to do, and realize they must explain their message clearly, and effectively. For this reason, our greatest leaders have always been the best listeners, because by effectively listening, one is best able to communicate most effectively.