Medical Billing Blog with Medical Billing & Coding Info & Articles

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Welcome to the medical billing blog containing news and articles relating to medical billing, medical coding, ICD, HIPAA and practice management functions.

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If You’re Considering Hiring a Medical Billing Consultant

Physicians who need help managing billing in their offices may want to consider a company that specializes in medical billing consulting. Medical billing services help doctors get paid from insurance companies. But medical billing consultants often go a step further, and help doctors manage all their finances, from billing, to accounts receivable, to collections. Some medical billing consulting services work on-site as part of the practice management team. Others work off-site and only come into the office as needed to analyze what needs to be done. Many help to train employees to better handle billing, coding and reimbursement issues. They may also help to analyze workflow in doctors’ offices, to

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P on June 23, 2006

Medical Billing a Healthy Part of Modern Medicine

Medical billing is the practical management aspect of medicine and the way the healthcare provider gets paid. Without a good medical billing and coding foundation to base the billing of a practice on, the practice will cease to exist from lack of revenue. In legalese, the “face-to-face contact between healthcare professional and an eligible beneficiary” is known as “an encounter.” For every such “encounter,” there is a specific code. These codes exist for the sole purpose of identifying for the payer what they are paying for. The services rendered codes (CPT) must match the diagnosis code (ICD) for the payment to be deemed necessary and just. CPT medical coding books

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P on June 22, 2006

Reasons to Outsource Your Medical Billing

In a busy practice, the attending physicians have no time to compile their own medical billing. Keeping up the with lightening fast coding changes is hard enough without keeping up with the necessary documentation, making judgment calls on complex issues and then coding and compiling a superbill for each and every patient seen. This sounds overwhelming and time consuming and in the early days of many a practice, many physicians did do their own medical billing. Good practices grow and soon the doctor had hired someone to take care of paperwork and submission of all their medical billing claims. This person is usually called a PA or physician assistants. It

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P on June 22, 2006

Keep Your Medical Billing Records Accurate

The life’s blood of any practice is the reimbursement revenue from the medical billing forms. Practitioners rely on accurate medical billing and coding to get their claims paid and not denied. Before a patient appointment, medical billers should remember to: Remind patients to bring all pertinent documentsCopy insurance and ID cards before appointmentsGather accurate patient informationObtain signature on assignment of benefits and HIPAA formsCollect co-pay After a patient appointment, healthcare providers should make sure that a detailed record has been kept of the patient encounter. Include such information as complaints, diagnoses, treatments provided, procedures recommended, or follow-up necessary. Furthermore, all of this information should be entered on the charge sheet

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P on June 21, 2006

Medical Billing and the Test of Good Coding

Medical billing professionals have many tasks beyond medical billing, including medical billing database management, spreadsheets and basic accounting to name a few. What has become the most important aspect of medical billing, and arguably the most difficult part of the job, is the challenge of medical billing codes. What makes coding in medical billing such a challenge? Many aspects, but first it’s important to understand the purpose of medical billing codes. Medical billing codes are what physicians submit to insurance companies or HMO’s (health maintenance organizations) in order to receive payment for each patient visit. Or, as it’s referred to in medical billing terms, each encounter. Part of what makes

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P on June 20, 2006