Medical Billing Blog: Section - Audit

Archive of all Articles in the Audit Section

This is the archive containing links to all articles written in the Audit section of our blog.

Click any of the article links below to read the entire article or browse another section to the right to read articles on another subject.

434.91 – Stroke – Hemorrhage or Both?

When using 434.91 make sure you take all of the specifics into account. When a doctor says that a patient has had a stroke make sure that you know all of the details of the situation or else some procedures can be hard to justify and therefore your medical billing reimbursement may be denied. In the past for diagnosis of a stroke the ICD-9 index listed 436, which is acute but ill defined cerebrovascular disease, as the code to use. Now the index has code 434.91 as the code to use. This is cerebral artery occlusion, unspecified with cerebral infarction. The new ICD-9 index automatically translates a doctors diagnosis of

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P | No Comments

Get Better Reimbursements on Common ER Procedures

Knowing when to use code 90782 in emergency department procedures can help with your medical billing reimbursements. For example, if a doctor examines a patient in the ED for an injury, and injects a preventative tetanus toxoid, your first instinct might be to use 90782 as a modifier for this procedure. But you would not receive a medical billing reimbursement because the incident to provision does not apply in the emergency department so you would not be able to justify having the doctor administer this injection. There would be no way to justify the medical necessity of such a shot. However, when you are in an office setting the CPT

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P | No Comments

ICD-9 Updates Coming October 1, 2007

Are you ready for the updates coming on October 1? There are a number of changes that will affect that way Medicare reimburses your practice for the services rendered as well as adding and retiring other codings. All of these changes will be effective for service dates after October 1. You can avoid a lot of paperwork hassles and denials by making the jump to outsourcing your medical billing. Your third party partner will keep up with the ICD-9 coding changes, rules and regulations and if you choose, can even do an audit of your current medical billing methods and show you how you can realize a better reimbursement rate

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P | No Comments

When to Use 90782

Knowing when to use code 90782 in emergency department procedures can help with your medical billing reimbursements. For example, if a doctor examines a patient in the ED for an injury, and injects a preventative tetanus toxoid, your first instinct might be to use 90782 as a modifier for this procedure. But you would not receive a medical billing reimbursement because the incident to provision does not apply in the emergency department so you would not be able to justify having the doctor administer this injection. There would be no way to justify the medical necessity of such a shot. However, when you are in an office setting the CPT

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P | No Comments

Aural Rehab Not Reimbursed?

Medical billing changes occur throughout each and every year and keeping up with those changes can be confusing. Aural Rehabilitation has become one major area of confusion since the 2006 update. The medical billing changes to Aural Rehab CPT codes has wrongly caused many people to believe Aural Rehabilitation is no longer a reimbursable service. Medicare actually assigned status code “I” to all new medical billing codes for auditory rehabilitation. These codes are 92630 and 92633. This means that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will not pay for auditory rehabilitation, only diagnostic audiology. However, this is only true if an audiologist performs the service and the medical billing.

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P | One Comment