Medical Billing Blog: Section - Denials

Archive of all Articles in the Denials Section

This is the archive containing links to all articles written in the Denials 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

Confused When to Use Fetal NST Code 59025?

The time to use 59025 to code a fetal non-stress test is when the patient records that she has felt the baby moving. If not then the fetal monitor is counted as routine. What makes the NST Code True? When you use the code 59025 for the fetal non-stress test for NST procedures you must make sure you are using them correctly. How that happens is that during the NST procedure the ob-gyn evaluates the patient and evaluates the well being of the fetus with out the use of IV medications. The test lasts for approximately 30-40 minutes, and the ob-gyn monitors the heart rate of the fetus using external

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

Get Top Reimbursements for Skin Graft Procedures

In 2006 several changes were made to the CPT regarding skin graft procedures and this included the retiring of several codes and the addition of 37 new skin graft codes to make identifying the procedures more exact for medical billing claims. The skin graft section was also renamed to Skin Replacement Surgery and Skin Substitutes. There are new codes for autografts, sections 15100 through 15261, allografts, sections 15170 through 15176 and xenografts, sections 15400 through 15431. These codes seem to have been created in order to represent some new procedures and techniques. Many of these new codes are also specific to a particular technology or product make sure that your

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

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