Medical Billing Blog with Medical Billing & Coding Info & Articles
Our blog contains news and articles relating to numerous healthcare sectors including revenue cycle management, medical billing, medical coding, ICD, HIPAA, practice management functions and more.
Press: We are Growing and Moving Again in 2014
As our client base and staffing needs continue to grow, Outsource Management Group will be moving its corporate headquarters in October 2014. Over the next 4 months our corporate offices will be transitioning from our current 4,000+ sq ft location into a new 5,000+ sq ft. headquarters in the same area of Bloomington, Indiana. This move will allow us to better accommodate the additional staff and equipment needed to continue to provide our current, as well as new clients with our leading medical billing services. We’re very excited with the exponential growth we’ve seen from 2012 through 2014 so far, and expect to see nothing but continued growth over the …
Is Your Small Practice Ready for ICD-10?
It’s 193 days to ICD-10 and to be honest, that’s not much time! It’s time to get your practice ready to use ICD-10, but where do you begin? There’s no question it can be overwhelming! Here’s the steps we recommend to any Providers that ask. Let’s get started. Put One Person in Charge First things first, you need to assign the task of overseeing ICD-10 to someone on your staff. It doesn’t matter whether that person is the biller, a coder, the office manager, or someone else. Their goal is to lead the process, ensure things are on task and on target, and to oversee the details. Develop a …
7 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Medical Billing with ICD-10
It can be difficult deciding whether to outsource your medical billing or not. With ICD-10 coming in October, There are many benefits of outsourcing your revenue cycle functions. Let’s take a look at 7 of those benefits. #1 Economy of Scale A billing service will distribute their expenses through their complete client base, which provide an economy of scale. They are able to operate with lowers costs than what a single practice can and those savings are passed on to their clients, making them very competitive. A billing service is able to afford to hire top-notch staff so you are able to pay less and get more. #2 …
Happy 11th Birthday to Our Corporate Website
This is not a typical post by any means, but I felt it was worth mentioning in the corporate category. Yesterday (Feb. 11, 2014) was the “Birthday” of our corporate website, it is now officially 11 years old. Let me add a little history as to how we got to this point… In late 2002, our CEO Melissa Clark was the billing director of an ambulatory clinic and decided to start her own billing firm. Melissa, along with her long-time friend and colleague Kathryn Etienne started Outsource Management Group, LLC. They quickly saw the immediate need for an online presence and employed a designer to get the domain and …
EHR Meaningful Use and Stage 2 Guidelines
January has brought upon the EHR (electronic health records) Stage 2 incentive programs start for physician and medical practices. However, there is a great deal of concern that those doctors who can meet Stage 1 requirements will not be able to meet the Stage 2, because their EHRs are not up to standard and neither are the vendors that they deal with. There are 2200 products and almost 1400 EHR certifications for Stage 1, but only 75 products and 21 EHR certifications for stage 2. Around 90 percent of the vendors are expected to not be ready for stage 2. Stage 2 is the second step of meaningful use for …
Is ICD-10 Going to Provoke a Level of Healthcare Insanity?
Is ICD-10 going to provoke a level of healthcare insanity? The opinions of a coder. ICD-10 or International Classification of Diseases is designed to create a system where there is compatibility throughout the nation relating to data collection, processing and classification of disease, as well as presenting mortality statistics. The ICD-9 has been revised and as a result, we now have the ICD-10, a whopping three volumes of alphanumeric categories. Some chapters have been changed and rearranged and some conditions have been regrouped from ICD-9. In fact, there is almost double the number of categories from ICD-9 to ICD-10. ICD-10 opponents say that ICD-10 has gone too far, that it …
ICD-10 for Substance Abuse & Mental Health Providers
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has published a new fact sheet designed to help mental health and substance abuse service providers make the transition to the new International Classification of Diseases, 10th Edition (ICD-10) code sets. ICD-10 will affect all diagnosis and inpatient procedure coding for everyone involved in mental health and substance abuse healthcare under HIPAA. However the change to ICD-10 does not affect CPT coding for outpatient procedures. All services provided for either substance use or mental disorders are subject to HIPAA standards; therefore, all mental health and substance abuse providers must shift to ICD-10 once it becomes effective on October 1st. SAMHSA’s new …
Deadlines: Regulations on HIPAA Compliance for Physicians
The deadline of September 23, 2013 has come and gone on the calendar. It was on this day the federal government enacted changes to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPAA. Medical physicians must be compliant with privacy and security and changes will include things like how to properly secure a patient’s health information or what you must tell a patient about their privacy rights. Medical physicians have 6 months to comply, and for many this is a difficult task to stay on so that the deadline is met. Compliance of the act includes the following updates to the regulations. Physicians must conduct a risk analysis …
