Medical Billing Blog: Section - Medical Coding

Archive of all Articles in the Medical Coding Section

This is the archive containing links to all articles written in the Medical Coding 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.

What ICD-10-CM Promises

What ICD-10-CM Promises The 30 year old medical billing ICD-9 coding system will soon be thrown out the window. This old system has long been outdated for our growing knowledge of medicine and medical treatments. We now know a lot more about diseases then we did thirty years ago. We also have discovered many new conditions and variations of old conditions. The new ICD-10 medical billing system promises great change to the health field. Over one hundred modern countries now use the ICD-10 medical billing coding system. The United States currently uses the ICD-9 system. With the old ICD-9 system it is very difficult transferring information back and forth between

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

Surefire Tips to Identify Wound Repair Level

Wound repair causes a lot of confusion among medical billers and medical coders. It’s not always easy to identify the level of wound repair involved when reading an operative report. If you cannot quickly ascertain the level of wound repair, then you need to check for a few things. In order to identify wound repair level, you should look to the operative report for these key words and clues: -If a surgeon mentions single layer closure in his or her operative report, it is a simple repair. Simple repairs involve superficial wounds that involve “primarily epidermis, or dermis or subcutaneous tissues without significant involvement of deeper structures” according to the

Published By: Kathryn Etienne, CCS-P | No Comments

Two Removals are Similar and Different

To avoid raised rejection of your medical billing claims for similar procedures that will be coded due to different removals or different parts of the body affected, you need to make sure you have iron-clad documentation. In some cases, you will come across two removals that are very similar, but different. For example, if a pediatrician removes an extra digit from a newborn’s hand, and also removes a skin tag from the newborn, the removal of an extra digit and the removal of a skin tag fall under the same CPT code but fall into different ICD-9 codes. For these two procedures, you should report 11200 (11200 is the removal

Published By: Kathryn Etienne, CCS-P | No Comments

New HCPCS Medical Billing Tool

Your practice should know where to look for medical billing changes each year. When dealing with HCPCS consolidated billing, many billers become confused about what codes are excluded from this type of billing. Before allowing your staff members to do medical billing, be sure they know where to look for answers to their coding questions. The source to find consolidated HCPCS medical billing codes is no longer in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Skilled Nursing Facility Help File. Since September 25, 2005, CMS has tried to steer medical billing staff members away from this file. Now, however, it is more important to do so. A new website has

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

Update Your Reporting Method To Medicare

Update Your Reporting Method To Medicare or Face Denials Times are changing when performing electronic medical billing to Medicare. Beginning on August 1, 2005, noncompliant electronic claims billed will be denied. These billed medical claims must be compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Currently there is a medical billing contingency plan in effect that does accept these noncompliant claims, but that will soon end. In order to ensure the most efficient payment possible, submitting compliant electronic claims is recommended. Otherwise, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will send the claim back to you unprocessed and with no payment. To get medically reimbursed for this billing,

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