Archive for The Month of July, 2006
Archive for the Month of July, 2006
Welcome to the medical billing blog archive for the month of July, 2006.
Here you will find links to every article added to the Outsource Management Group web site during the month of July, 2006.
You can browse this month's archives by clicking the "More" button from any of the excerpts below.
Understanding Medical Billing and Revenue Codes
Not all medical billing is generated from physician’s services. Sometimes services are rendered to patients and the medical billing created from those procedures need to be submitted to the various insurance carriers, but they also need three things: a price, a procedure code, and a revenue code. Revenue codes indicate to the type of service that you are billing for; revenue codes are 3-digit codes, and those revenue codes must match up with specific procedure codes to designate what services were rendered. For instance, if you are using a 360 revenue code, you’re stating that the services rendered were performed in the operating room, and therefore, the procedure codes that …
Changes Coming to Follow Up Care in September 2006
If your practice routinely provides burn or laceration follow up care, head’s up because after September of this year, there will be three new post-op codes added that will better detail the services rendered during the patient’s visit and should improve your reimbursement rate. Be sure and alert your staff that V58.3 will no longer be a valid code to use and the new three designations should be chosen from when coding the patient’s visit. The three new designations are as follows: * nonsurgical wound dressing change or removal, V58.30* surgical wound dressing change or removal, V58.31* suture removal, V58.32. Having more exact coding designations to go with the ICD-9 …
Undercoding Your Medical Billing Can Cost Your Practice
A well-known secret in the medical billing industry is that many physicians purposefully undercode because they are fearful of the penalties for overcoding or unbundling their medical billing claims. Another big mistake some physicians make is to leave their coding to their staff, which is guaranteed to have errors because the staff has no way of knowing exactly which services occurred in the exam room and which did not. In capitated care issues, physicians who don’t code for supplies reimbursement on their medical billing claims lose a lot of money. Imagine if every patient that you provided services to was worth an extra $50, imagine how that revenue would add …
Get Reimbursed for Tests
Diagnostic testing causes a lot of confusion in medical billing. One rule of thumb when doing the billing is to only report what your documentation will support. It is tempting to report a diagnosis that comes after a pathology test because common sense would tell you that it is more likely to be paid. Instead report the reason for test and use your medical necessity such as patient complaints and symptoms to back up the reasons for the test. Use your judgment when reporting testing and don’t use presumed diagnosis where an illness or condition is trying to be “ruled out”. Instead code the signs and symptoms the patient is …
Coding Dual Procedures
If you have a core biopsy and an FNA (Fine Needle Aspiration) performed on the same day, your CMS manual states you cannot report fine needle aspiration (FNA) codes 10021 and 10022 with another biopsy procedure code for the same lesion. A good example of this is when a physician performs an FNA and core biopsy for the same breast lesion during the same encounter, but does not document that the FNA sample was inadequate for diagnosis. The physician performed the services described by 10022 (Fine needle aspiration; with imaging guidance), 19102 (Biopsy of breast; percutan-eous, needle core, using imaging guidance), and 76096 (Mammographic guidance for needle placement, breast [e.g., …
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