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Quick Submission Equals Quick Reimbursement

There are many issues that can affect your medical billing claim turn around time. ED visits are notorious for having slow claim submissions and incomplete records. And there are some factors you simply cannot manage. Electronic filing versus paper filing is one thing you can control. Medical billing is much quicker if electronic charts are used. As soon as your patient presents in your clinic, the medical billing clock begins to tick. Every piece of information that is gathered from the time of arrival, until a treatment is successful is put into a file. These medical records are used for medical billing many times. Incomplete medical records or the lacking

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P on June 9, 2006

Correct Medical Billing Reimbursement For 77470

There are some cases when certain medical billing practices can get your office more financial reimbursement. The use of the current procedural terminology code 77470 is one of those instances. This code, however, cannot be used all of the time. There are certain things you must keep in mind before using the medical billing code 77470 for your claims. Sometimes the physicians in your clinic can see patients with special needs. For instance, an oncologist may see a patient that has a pacemaker. The pacemaker can make visits and treatment plans more time consuming for the physician. In this instance, the medical billing code 77470 may be used. 77470 in

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P on June 8, 2006

Medical Billing Dilemma – Usage of Fetal NST Code 59025

When you use the code 59025 for the fetal non-stress test for NST procedures you must make sure you are using them correctly. In many cases this procedure gets confused with a labor check. 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. 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

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P on June 8, 2006

Proper Usage of Modifier 59

The HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that there is an enormous amount of claims in which modifier 59 is being misused. The misuse is completely unintentional and is largely due to the confusion this modifier causes with many practices when the medical coding is being generated. A random sample of 350 code pairings of samples was taken by the OIG. These random samples were ones that had bypassed the NCCI (National Correct Coding Initiative) edits by using the modifier 59. The OIG also found that about 40 percent of the code pairs they examined didn’t meet the requirements of the program. This translates to roughly $59 million dollars

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P on June 7, 2006

Correctly Using Modifier 22 in Your Medical Billing

In medical billing, modifiers can be just as important as the CPT codes they append. A simple mistake such as miss sequencing these codes could lead to incorrect reimbursements. There is one modifier that is known as being the most incorrectly used modifier: 22. Modifier 22 (Unusual procedural services) is used to indicate a substantial amount of extra work a physician needs to do for a specific procedure. As a matter of fact, there are some procedures that never get separately reimbursed unless modifier 22 is used in medical billing. The lyses of adhesions are one example of this. The lyses of adhesions are a procedure that is always bundled

Published By: Melissa Clark, CCS-P on June 7, 2006