Archive for The Month of October, 2006
Archive for the Month of October, 2006
Welcome to the medical billing blog archive for the month of October, 2006.
Here you will find links to every article added to the Outsource Management Group web site during the month of October, 2006.
You can browse this month's archives by clicking the "More" button from any of the excerpts below.
Medical Billing Reimbursements Will Increase for Home Care
Many states will be reaping the rewards of increased home care medical billing reimbursements, due to an experiement currently going on in a few states. A few states, such as Wisconsin and Missouri, have been working to come up with a solution for this big expense. Improved medical billing reimbursement and funding may be the answer to improving home care. Wisconsin is one of the few states implementing a program called the Family Care program. This provides assistance for low income senior citizens and disabled people for long term care. These folks already feel the hardship of medical billing costs. The program is designed to ease some of those expenses …
Is The Same Day Admission and Discharge Myth Costing You Money?
There is a long held myth in the medical billing community that you can’t bill for an admission and discharge on the same day. However, the truth of the matter is that you can generally bill for a discharge from one facility and an admission to another, as long as the same physician is present for both events. This means that the attending physician will leave one facility and go to the next facility. This is a common occurence with transfers between rehab or psych facilities, or a transfer from a hospital to a nursing home. The dilemma is that since you cannot transfer the patient’s chart from one facility …
The Dermabond Dilemma
When a wound needs closing and a tissue adhesive is used the medical billing coding can be different than when sutures or stitches are used. There are specific guidelines for medical billing when tissue adhesives are used. All adhesives including Dermabond have their own unique way of being reported on medical billing. Consult with Medicare or the carrier to ensure that you are meeting those guidelines prior to submitting your medical billing. There are five basic guidelines that Medicare requires in order to reimburse for this service and many carriers follow the same criteria for laceration closures utilizing Dermabond. You should report G0168 for Medicare patients only; the CPT code …
Will Inaccurate Activities of Daily Living Scores Hurt You?
You bet. ADL coding is something that auditors will be watching heavily and if you’re not calculating yours correctly, you’ll penalized and fined. One way to make sure your facility is well within the guidelines of billing permissibly and ethically is to do a RUG profile of your residents and compare your facility to the state and national averages. You can compare your facility to the other agencies in your state against the national averages at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Web site:(http://www.cms.hhs.gov/www.cms.hhs.gov/apps/mds). If you find that your facility has far fewer rehab RUGs ending in C’s and far more A’s than the national or state average, than …
Wound Length Matters in Medical Billing
When a patient reports to the ED and requires laceration repair, the medical billing claim needs to address the length of the wound in order to be a properly filed claim. If the wound length is either not addressed or addressed incorrectly, the claim may be either denied, rejected or only partially paid. Additional factors can include whether or not there was a separate evaluation and how the service was managed during the encounter. Make sure all of these factors are documented in your medical billing claim. Laceration repairs are very common in the ED, in fact a nationwide survey showed that every one in fifteen patients presenting in the …
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