CMS has announced a glitch in the quality reporting measures brought upon by the changes in the ICD-CM (Clinical Modification) and ICD-PCS (Procedural Coding System) updates that went into affect…
Five tactics to educate physicians and improve documentation. Q: Our coders and coding auditors often see patterns of incorrect physician documentation. Sometimes the error impacts the MS-DRG, but many times…
The calendar may say the ICD-10 transition is long gone, but practices still will likely feel its repercussions in 2017 in terms of payer requests, denials and the new code…
Imagine going on Amazon, buying an Electronic Spin the Bottle Game for its listed price of $32.92, receiving the product (sparing the arduous effort required to spin the bottle) and…
My health insurance plan jumped 24 percent this fall and dropped in quality of coverage. I’m not alone. Rising health insurance costs across the nation have many people worried. A…
On October 1, the grace period for allowing providers to submit “less-than specific” codes ran out. If you recall, when ICD-10-CM went live in 2015, the federal government gave providers…
Most hospitals gained at least $1.5 million in healthcare revenue after clinical documentation improvement implementation, a Black Book survey found. Nearly 90 percent of hospitals with 150 or more beds…
When CMS switched from ICD-9 to ICD-10 last year, the new diagnosis classification list allowed coders to translate additional elements of doctors’ language to billers’ language. In a sense, ICD-10…
The ICD-10 codes changed for 2017 and include 1,974,311 deleted codes, and 425 revised codes. These went into effect October 1, 2016. Most chiropractors, fortunately, are only affected by about…
As the healthcare industry transitions from fee-for-service to value-based care, health information professionals are on the frontlines of these momentous changes helping clinicians leverage technology to achieve better patient outcomes…
Central Learning's national 2016 ICD-10 coding contest highlighted the converse relationship between coding accuracy and productivity across inpatient, ambulatory and emergency settings. Central Learning is a web-based coding assessment application,…
Vaccine administration is an important element of primary care practice, and a critical contribution to preventive care public health. But as vaccine and overhead costs continue to rise—particularly for private…
A year after the much-hyped switch to the ICD-10 diagnostic coding library, healthcare providers now face pressures to assign codes with the right degree of specificity or risk claim denials.…
Do you bill medical insurance for medically necessary dental procedures performed in your office? If you do, it’s important to understand the changes to the CDT codes for 2017. When…
2015 was a notorious year for cyber attacks in the healthcare industry, with more than 100 million health care records compromised in a single year. So far 2016 looks like…
Since the update from ICD-9 to ICD-10, has your business successfully made the transition to the new coding system, or are you still struggling to keep up? If it’s the…