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.
2004-2024 Celebrating 20 Years of Healthcare RCM Articles
The Blog Currently Contains 1,265+ Healthcare Articles
Is Your Staff Disaster Code Ready?
Hurricane season 2007 won’t be starting up again until June, however with the appearance of El Nino, a natural phenomenon that brings warmer currents to the oceans, a larger number of hurricanes is slated to develop along with more severe storms across the United States. With bad weather, unfortunately comes disasters and catastrophes, make sure if you live in a highly likely area to experience severe flooding, tornados or hurricanes that you educate your staff on using the correct codes for these special types of claims. CPT added two codes to reflect disaster related coding (DR) and catastrophe/disaster related (CR). DR is the top-level code and CR is the modifier …
Get Up To Date On Your Q Modifiers for Foot Care
More Q Modifiers were updated recently, make sure that your staff is up to date on the currently preferred to be reported when the physician is performing foot care. Modifiers Q7 (One class A finding), Q8 (Two class B findings) or Q9 (One class B and two class C findings) tell insurers why your physician is performing foot care. To determine which modifier applies to your physician’s claim, check out the following list of what Medicare and other payers include in each description: Class A Finding:Nontraumatic amputation of foot or integral skeletal portion thereof Class B Findings:Absent posterior tibial pulseAdvanced trophic changes such as (three of the following sub-categories qualify …
Understanding HIPAA Requirements for E-Security
If you haven’t taken the time to evaluate your data; both the data that you actively send as well as the data at rest. If you don’t you could be in violation of the new HIPAA violations. Recently, HIPAA made a final security rule and while the final ruling does not mandate that you encrypt all of your email transmission but it does require that you examine how all of your data is transferred on an overall scale. There are two key items that will help you evaluate how your data is transmitted. (1)integrity controls and (2)encryption. Integrity control sounds a little confusing, but it really just means proper access …
Coding a Follow-Up Visit that Turns Into a Counseling Session
Patients don’t always stick to the sole reason for their medical visit. Especially pediatric visits. A good scenario that is not too uncommon is when a mother brings in her son for a follow up visit to determine if his ear infection (otitis media) has subsided with the antibiotic regiment that was prescribed. However during the recheck she has questions about some behavior she is seeing in her son that leads her to believe he may be ADD (attention deficit disorder) and the physician has a counseling session with her that discusses options and risks involved, possibility of medications and other forms of treatment that takes about 25 minutes. The …
Getting Rid of Hard Copies
A question that comes up periodically is how should a medical practice dispose of the hard copies of files? The answer isn’t rocket science, shredding is the only good answer. When you are ready to dispose of hard copies medical files, anything with a patient’s name on it should be shredded.If you don’t have the staff available you don’t want to invest in an industrial-sized shredder, a good alternative would be to hire an outside shredding service that will either come to your offices and shred on site; or pick up your files, lock and store them in sealed containers and put them on a closed end truck that is …
