Medical Billing Blog: Section - Medical Data
Archive of all Articles in the Medical Data Section
This is the archive containing links to all articles written in the Medical Data section of our blog.
Click any of the article links below to read the entire article or browse another section to the right to read articles on another subject.
Can Your Practice Benefit From the Auditory Rehabilitation Boost?
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have recently made it known that the reimbursement for procedural code 92696 is going to be increases by a rather large amount. To clarify a little bit further, the reimbursement to providers for such a procedure will come in at approximately four times the amount being received currently. This should make any of the providers of language, speech and hearing much happier when it comes to medical billing. This entire thought of reimbursement may be a lot clearer if it is broken down a bit. For example, the code 92626 which is known for the description of Evaluation of Auditory Rehabilitation Status; first …
The Sensitive Issue of Handling Hard Copies
A question that comes up often is exactly 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 and 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 …
Are Your E-Transmissions HIPAA Compliant?
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. The last security rule made by HIPAA (and while the final ruling does not mandate that you encrypt all of your email transmission)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 controls and …
Been Hit With Medically Unlikely Edits Denials?
It can happen to any individual who is involved with coding, dealing with MUEs can end up being a nightmare if you do not know when and how to use them. MUEs, which is short for the term Medically Unlikely Edits, happen to be put in place to try and help limit the amount of billing errors. The more you understand them, the better off you will be when you find that you need to use them. If you are worried about dealing with MUEs, then you really should know that you are not alone. Luckily, there are a couple of things that you can look to and keep in …
Medical Coding for Multiple FB’s in the Same Site?
Foreign bodies as you are well aware present often as people get in all sorts of accidents at the home and on the job. From the splinter in the eye from the weekend warrior who decided he was too cool to wear safety glasses when he was building a table to the kid that came into the ER with multiple embeds under the skin; they are all reimbursable procedures and if you aren’t getting half or better reimbursements, then you need to brush up on your coding and make sure your medical billing claims are airtight. Generally, it is always best to use only one code for foreign body removal …
Taking the Pain Out of Handling Pregnant Patient Transfers
Medical billing for pregnant patients is a fairly cut and dried process. It’s easy to create medical necessity for the visits and it’s easy to show the reasons for the continued visits. That is, unless the patient transfers practices in the middle of her prenatal care. Pregnancy transfers scare many medical billing personnel, however you can use three easy tips and make your maternity patient transfers a breeze. How you do medical billing for a maternity transfer all depends on how many times she was seen in the clinic. If she was seen 1-3 times you always want to code those visits as evaluation and management visits. One thing to …
Multi-Day Observation Claims Don’t Have to Mean Rejections
Confused about multi-day observations? Well, you’re not along. Multi-day observation medical billing claims can cause a lot of confusion. In order to get the correct reimbursements on your medical billing claims, you need to be sure that your multi-day observation billings are reported correctly – otherwise you’re practice isn’t receiving the maximum reimbursements for the services rendered and you’re in effect – losing money. A main rule of thumb when doing medical billing for multi-day observation is to report per day of service. This means that if a patient is admitted late at night and isn’t discharged until the next morning, you report both service dates. The two current procedural …
Coding Follow Up Office Visits
Patient history is valuable any time you’re building up your documentation to show medical necessity for reimbursement of any procedure. Any time you are coding for problem visits that a patient has, it is important that you take into consideration any other office visits that they may have recently had. Basically, you are going to want to look to see if there is a connection between visits for preventative medicine as well as current health issues that may be in place, which also needs some attention. Many times, a physician will end up seeing a patient that shows up in search of a visit to fall into the category of …
Compiling Your Medical Billing for Specific Injections
B-12 injections are a very common procedure. If you’re only receiving partial payments or experiencing rejections of your claims, you may need to tighten up your handling of these claims as the codes and procedures for filing criteria have undergone changes in the past year. To eliminate potential medical billing problems, there are five steps to follow to ensure smooth B-12 reimbursement for your claim. The first medical billing step is to replace the injection administration codes for the B-12. These codes include the current procedural terminology codes 90782, 90788, and G0351. These medical billing codes were deleted from the 2006 CPT list and should no longer be used. The …
Mastectomy and Lymph Excision Medical Billing Tips
When the surgeon removes lymph nodes during a partial mastectomy, it may be confusing as to how to the mastectomy and the lymph excision. A common point of confusion is whether they should be bundled or reported separately. The answer is pretty cut and dried. In most cases, with partial mastectomy, the surgeon will perform an axillary lymphadenectomy to remove the lymph nodes between the pectoralis major and the pectoralis minor muscles. The surgeon may also remove the nodes in the axilla through a separate incision at the same time. When this occurs, you should not report the mastectomy and lymphadenectomy (38745, Axillary lymphadenectomy; complete) separately. Instead, you should use …
