As physician practice contracts come up for renewal, health systems are being selective in offering renewals to those practices and physicians that they believe are most advantageous to retain as employees and seeking to part company with the less profitable practices on good terms.

The biggest villain to wealth preservation and transfer is not the IRS--though they are a close second. The biggest villain is procrastination.

Just as they recommend preventative steps for their patients, so too should physicians follow a series of steps to prevent financial health problems in their practices.

By structuring clear employment policies now, and communicating these policies to your employees, your practice will hopefully avoid employment-related liability claims.

Misidentifying the provider who actually rendered services could establish civil false claims or criminal liability, or an overpayment and recoupment action.

The new law broadly affects physicians in a manner that is not limited to income taxes--it also creates tremendous savings and planning opportunities in the areas of education, retirement planning and estate planning.

By working with your patients through education and supportive customer service, and by communicating financial expectations and outcomes, your practice can redirect their loyalty, strengthen the patient-doctor relationship and create additional financial advocates for your practice.

Skyrocketing costs, increasing governmental regulations and legislation, managed care and other third party payors, and increased competition are all important factors which contribute to the drive towards larger medical groups. Innovative thinking and good business planning are necessary to meet the future challenges, and one strong option is for practitioners to become larger through merger.

The Final Rule clarifies certain incident to billing requirements and recognizes that auxiliary personnel providing an incident to benefit may be an employee, leased employee, or independent contractor and may provide services incident to the services of physicians who employ or contract with them or who are employees or independent contractors of the same entity.

Covered entities are required to develop policies and procedures, consent forms and authorization forms for the disclosure of Private Health Information.