All Articles Written by Kathryn Disney-Etienne, CCS-P, RT
All Articles Written by Kathryn Etienne, CCS-P - RETIRED
Welcome to the archived list of all medical billing articles written and previously posted to the site by Kathryn Etienne, CCS-P, retired Director of Operations.
All articles are listed below and categorized by date, newest to oldest. Click any article link below to read the entire article.
Using Modifier 51 With Lesion Removal
Lesion removals can be complex to report, however if you just break down the medical billing claim, you’ll find getting your filing points just right is a breeze. Your claim will usually start in the emergency room and remember that in almost all cases, the excision site before sending the patient home. If this closure represents a simple repair, the work involved is bundled into the lesion excision code you report on the claim. The other side of that type of claim however can be if the repair of the excision site gets more complicated, you’ll be able to report the closure as a separate procedure from the excision procedure. …
Laceration Medical Billing Claims Made Easy
Lacerations are a common occurrence in the ED and knowing the in’s and out’s of medical billing for these types of claims will make filing each and every single one of them a breeze. For example if you have a patient that presents who was using a table saw on the job and lacerated index and middle fingers on the palmar surface, but there is no significant bleeding and he is otherwise healthy. How would you report this? On further examination the physician finds on the pad of the distal phalanx of both involved fingers is a 1.5-cm laceration that is jagged with protruding fat. The notes read that the …
Coding Pediatric Injections For Max Return
Therapeutic and antibiotic injections went through some changes in 2006 and make sure that your medical billing claims reflect those updates or you might be suffering from partial payments or rejections of your medical billing claims. In the past there were separate injection administration codes for a therapeutic, prophylactic, diagnostic, and antibiotic injections. Instead of choosing to report administration of a prophylactic Synagis treatment (90378) with a 90782 (Therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic injection , you now simply use 90772 as a universal injection code. On E/M coding, you will generally still need to attach modifier 25 to insure your claim is handled. Modifier 25 states that this procedure or other …
Switching to Outsourcing Made Painless
Most practices start out very small and usually with just a doctor and one other person. Between yourself and the other person, you answer phones, greet patients and grow your practice and soon you may find that you need help keeping up with your medical billing claims. Many doctors start expanding their staff at this point, hiring assistants and office personnel to handle the additional workload that happens as the practice continues to grow. And then new fees are added to your overhead in the form of additional salaries to pay, unemployment and state and federal taxes. This is when many physicians begin thinking about outsourcing and for the majority …
Revisiting Modifiers 25 and 57
If you have a number of medical billing claims getting rejected, once you rule out any larger reasons, you might start looking for the key in the use of; or rather the lack of not using modifiers as a part of your medical billing claims. Two of the main modifiers that get people in trouble with their medical billing claims in the forms of rejections are modifiers 25 and 57. Modifier 25 reads , “Significant, separately identifiable evaluation and management service by the same physician on the same day of the procedure or other service” is kind of a catch all modifier for procedures that may not have an exact …
