Staff News Writer

Physicians providing care to Medicare patients this year will face a 2 percent payment penalty in 2016. As the AMA works to lessen this burden, you can take advantage of a new reporting option to improve patient outcomes while simultaneously lessening your chances of incurring penalties.

The AMA’s online ethics journal, Virtual Mentor, now offers an outstanding opportunity for physicians and physicians in training to be part of an important discussion and get their peer-reviewed articles published. Virtual Mentor is a student- and resident-driven journal published online monthly; it is advertisement-free and open-access.

Be prepared for the spookiest season of the year. With ICD-10 implementation coming Oct. 1 of next year, here are the ICD-10 diagnosis codes you may need for Halloween.

The United States has more than 6,000 designated health professional shortage areas in primary care alone. With the AMA Health Workforce Mapper, an interactive tool, you and your staff can determine locations to establish or expand your practice based on regional needs for access to care, geographic features and the existing health care workforce.

Medical students’ level of tolerance for ambiguity may be closely tied to how they deal with stress and where they will practice, according to a recent study in Academic Medicine. The survey asked incoming students to rate how they agreed with statements such as, “I don’t like to work on a problem unless there is a possibility of getting a clear-cut and unambiguous answer.”

An estimated 86 million American adults have prediabetes, but only one in 10 of these people knows they are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Fifteen free and charitable clinics across the country will receive funding to help reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes as part of two grant programs from the AMA Foundation and AmeriCares.

The Florida Supreme Court is taking up Edwards v. Sunrise Ophthalmology ASC, in which a lower court had excluded the testimony of an infectious disease specialist, which was offered regarding the standard of care the plaintiff received from her ophthalmologist related to surgery on her lower eyelid.