Archive for the Week of February 16, 2007
Archive for the Week of February 16, 2007
Welcome to the medical billing blog archive for the week of February 16, 2007.
Here you will find links to every article added to the Outsource Management Group web site during the week of February 16, 2007.
You can browse this week's archives by clicking the "More" button from any of the excerpts below.
In Medical Billing, Partners are Valuable Assets
Did you know your medical billing partner can be counted among your most valuable business assets? Customer service and health care are also very important aspects of your practice, however, medical billing is the core of the business. You should know at all times that people responsible for the core of your business can be trusted. Knowing your medical billing staff members is imperative to your success. Medical coding and billing is an extremely skilled practice. When you outsource your medical billing claims, you have to have confidence that your medical billing partner will check the coding, put the medical documentation in order, make notations where needed and submit your …
Understanding Observation Medical Billing
A common problem many medical billing professionals face is how to handle observation related medical billing claims. The basic rule is that the patient must be in observation for a minimum of 8-hours to qualify for medical billing for observation stays. In the situation where you have a patient that was admitted and stayed less than eight hours and was released and then re-admitted less than eight hours later, is to use the observation as one day but not the same day as the discharge. CPT codes 99218-99220 and 99217. For handling an observation stay that includes an admission and discharge on the same date, you would not use 99218-99220 …
Nurses Help Hospital Medical Billing Bottom Lines
You already knew that nurses were important to your patient’s health care, but did you know they also help your medical billing reimbursement bottom line? Although there would be increased hours for the nurses, it would not mean more medical billing cost to you. Extra nurse hours would mean improved medical billing reimbursement for your hospital. A recent study done shows that a nurse care could reduce patient deaths by 6700 per year. Not only would patient deaths decrease per year, but the number of hospital days would decrease by 4 million as well. You may think that less hospital days would mean less medical billing reimbursement. However, that is …
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 …
