Overview: It is a given that understanding E/M guidelines is critical for accurate and appropriate coding. Perhaps even more important, understanding how to benchmark E/M utilization is the key to developing advanced management strategies. This includes compliance risk assessments, financial impact analyses and understanding how to interpret variances from national and local comparative databases. Why should you attend: While covering basic techniques, such as intra-category analysis, this workshop goes well beyond the 'bell curve' concept, focusing on new and emerging techniques, including comparative metrics for inter-category (category to category), and global category (category to total) utilization. Attendees will also be introduced to two cutting edge methodological concepts; differential modeling, which is used to quantify the variance between the practice and any control group and the Cohen Acuity Factor (CAF); and advanced technique used to standardize the Medicare "bell curves" for any payer mix. The CAF is the only mathematical model that can accurately project the financial impact of over and under coding.