The Department of Health and Human Services is announcing a funding opportunity of nearly $15 million for a three-year federal grant to establish a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services…
“Every great story starts with a tipping point. You have to have something that made you make a Herculean change.” For Detroit’s Davies Award-winning Henry Ford Health System, that came…
SPELLING OUT MEDICAL NECESSITY Q: Does a diagnosis code alone support medical necessity for lab tests? Shouldn’t there be something in the note documenting a sign/symptom or current status of…
As it was billed and touted, ICD-10-CM/PCS gives medical personnel vastly expanded powers of specificity when diagnosing diseases and other health issues. Yet that greatly enhanced specificity comes with a…
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has launched an online resource to support states' efforts to update outdated IT systems, Andy Slavitt, CMS' acting administrator, announced on Monday. Through…
After a number of delays, and much anticipation, the implementation of ICD-10 is finally underway as of Oct. 1. But with all the competition in the job market this year…
Physicians report they are still happy in light of healthcare changes, according to Physicians Practice's 2015 Great American Physician survey. Kareo sponsored the survey. Here are six key points: 1.…
At Greensboro, NC-based Cone Health—a six-hospital, not-for-profit health system with 1,242 beds and gross annual revenue of $2 billion—a number of revenue pressures are making it tougher than ever to…
Text of a bill by Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, to delay the switch to ICD-10 diagnostic coding surfaced on Monday, in which it requests further study on the disruption on…
The American Medical Association (AMA) has submitted codes that could finally lead to Medicare reimbursement for end-of-life and advanced care conversations, five years after a previous effort was squashed when…
As we move towards building a universal patient-centered data platform in health IT, several sources of data are useful. Data coming from transitions of care, clinical summary documents (C-CDAs) which…
A delay in requiring all providers of medical care to use a new health-records and billing system to describe treatments is giving small medical offices major headaches. Billing is a…
Healthcare providers say Medicare is going to short-change them on patients who spend fewer than two nights in the hospital, and delaying implementation of a new payment policy until October…
From patient accounting systems to sticky notes and "cheat sheets" posted in exam rooms, ICD-9 codes permeate the health care environment, translating the information in medical records to numbers on…
There’s no way around it. To make the conversion to ICD-10 coding by the Oct. 1 deadline, dual coding needs to be on the list. This is when healthcare organizations…
Outsourcing medical coding and billing requirements is definitely beneficial in terms of reduced workload, better performance and improved revenue. However, the task of hiring a medical coding company should be…