Medical Billing Blog with Medical Billing & Coding Info & Articles
Our blog contains news and articles relating to numerous healthcare sectors including revenue cycle management, medical billing, medical coding, ICD, HIPAA, practice management functions and more.
Pediatric Patient History – Who Can Take It?
Contrary to popular belief, it is safe practice to allow any office member to take the review of systems and the family social history. These two evaluation and management history elements can actually be taken by absolutely anyone. It is ok in medical billing for a parent or a secretary to take down this information as long as the information is reviewed and signed off on by the acting pediatrician. The only part of an evaluation and management visit that the physician or nurse practitioner must complete for medical billing purposes is the history of present illness or the reason for the visit. By allowing your administrative staff to complete …
Getting Your Medical Billing Reimbursement-Nonphysician Practitioners
If you aren’t getting a reimbursement for the services rendered to patients by a nonphysician practitioner (NPP) affiliate with your practice, you’re leaving money on the table for the insurance company that rightfully belongs to your practice. Learn the rules of the carrier and take the time to bill under the NPP provider number and statistics show that over three-fourths of the health plans billed would reimburse at an average rate of 85%. While this isn’t a full reimbursement, it is far better than not receiving anything in return for your services rendered. There are two main rules for using this type of billing. The patient’s physician or another affiliated …
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 This old system has long been outdated for our growing knowledge of medicine and medical treatments.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 …
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 …
OMG Moves into It’s New 4500 Sq Ft Facility Near the Hospital
Outsource Management Group is pleased to announce that we have moved to our new, larger operations facility on Bloomfield Road near IU Health Bloomington Hospital. Outsource Management Group was originally born in March of 2003 in a small home office in Bloomington, Indiana. As the business began to quickly outgrow this office, it was moved into a much larger 1,200 square foot facility on 17th Street in early 2004. This move allowed the business to continue providing physicians with excellent results and grow it’s client base by 10 times, as well as increasing the billing staff by 6 times. As the client base and staff continued to grow, it became …
Bill One or Bill Twice for 97001/97002?
Patient evaluation codings can be very confusing. The patient initial evaluation code is 97001 (also, 97003, 92506, 92610) however if the patient is reevaluated (97002- patient reevaluation) within a 12 month period only one unit of service may be billed to Medicare Part B patients no matter how much time was spent actually servicing the patient. If you make a mistake and bill the carrier for the evaluation and a unit of service for the reevaluation, your claim will be denied based on incorrect coding no matter how much medical documentation you provide showing the necessity of the reevaluation of the patient. Keeping up with the fast paced changes of …
Is It Time to Outsource Your Medical Billing?
If you are noticing your medical billing claims are taking longer and longer to be reimbursed or you are having denials, rejections, or only partial reimbursements on your medical billing claims, it may be time to look at outsourcing your medical billing claims. You may feel as though you would be giving up control of your cash flow when actually you will have more control than ever. In fact, outsourcing your medical billing and coding needs through a medical billing partner is one of the smartest business moves you can make. The best company to handle your medical billing isn’t necessarily located around the corner from your practice or even …
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 …
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 …
Watch Out for New Medical Billing DNA Test
Keeping current with your medical billing codes could help your lab succeed. New tests and lab works are developed each and every year. Some of these new tests have a positive impact on your medical billing, while others have no impact at all. A new test call Fluorescence Chain Reaction (FCR) may have an extremely positive impact on your medical billing. Fluorescence Chain Reaction is a brand new lab test that checks human DNA. The amazing aspect of this test is the short amount of time needed to retrieve results. This method takes less than five minutes to produce accurate information. Although insurance payers may be more familiar with the …
