Today’s topic is in reference to a coder question posed about discharge status for inpatients who are waiting for discharge to a nursing home. The questioner noted the possibility of…
The first day of summer will be this week, so it’s a good time for a look at some codes we may be assigning. Summertime brings more time outside relaxing…
Continuing our look at areas where we see confusion we will examine the assignment of the long term use codes for anticoagulants versus antithrombotics/antiplatelets. GoodRx.com, in an article titled, “Antiplatelet…
As healthcare continues to evolve in response to technological innovation and changing patient expectations, coding professionals are at the forefront of documenting that transformation. The CPT® 2025 code set, released…
Continuing with our look at areas of coding confusion, let’s today examine pain. According to Medline Plus Magazine from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), pain is the most common…
While underdosing is no longer a new concept in coding it remains a common area of confusion. Underdosing is when a patient takes less of a medication than is prescribed. …
One of the goals of medical coding is documenting encounter notes to the highest degree of specificity. ICD-10-CM had some existing codes for documenting foreign bodies entering through a natural…
A Request for Information has been published in the Federal Register (Federal Register :: National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics; Meeting and Request for Information) asking comments on ICD-11…
November is Diabetes Awareness Month, and it seems additionally appropriate to review diabetes when there is a focus on chronic diseases. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), diabetes…
There are false negatives; there are false positives; there are untested individuals with disease. I am in the process of developing a 90-minute COVID-19 webinar for ICDUniversity in December to…
According to ICD-10, gone are the days when you had to be chemically dependent on a substance in order to experience withdrawal (I will defer my criticism of that logic…
We are learning more every day about the sequela conditions that might arise as a result of COVID-19. The early studies have found decreased lung function that might not be…
CMS recently released the fiscal year (FY) 2021 ICD-10-PCS code set, which includes 544 new codes for Fragmentations of the veins and arteries, Drainages of the pelvic cavity, and Imaging…
Biomedical innovators have mobilized across the world to address COVID-19, from the initiation of clinical trials for potential vaccines to ongoing studies of repurposed medications for potential therapeutic and prophylactic…
Hospitals have relied on a relatively manual process and retrospective audits for coding compliance, but new technology is streamlining the process, allowing providers to get ahead of denials. Healthcare technology…
Billing and coding is always a challenge, but optometrists new to the field of neuro-optometric rehabilitation can find it doubly so, because the charting notes required are very different from…