Fail to take appropriate steps to curb incidental uses and disclosures of PHI, and you could easily find yourself running into a brick wall of irate patients and potential HIPAA violations.
So what is...
When your physician participates in a surgical case because the patient had bleeding (hemorrhage) problems, you typically include 998.11 (Hemorrhage complicating a procedure) as one of your diagnosis codes. That will change once...
If the physician documents a "right carotid endarterectomy," you can easily report your ICD-9 procedure code -- but your potential selections become a little more complicated in ICD-10-PCS. If you want to avoid having...
If you are anywhere related to importing or growing/processing of human or animal food in the United States for the purpose of general consumption, you have to be abreast with the latest food...
Coding for your home health patients’ psychiatric conditions can win you additional case mix points, but it can also bring unwanted scrutiny. To safeguard your reimbursement and keep your claims audit-hardy, make sure...
Every hospice has been there -- a patient goes into the hospital without your knowledge or approval, and you get slapped with a whopping bill from the facility. According to CMS, you don’t necessarily...
Pharmaceutical industry is highly regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration as it deals with live subjects and living beings. Non-compliance in the pharma industry will lead to fines and penalties for...
Tip: Coders can trip on any number of choices when trying to decide among spinal instrumentation add-on codes: approach, segmental or non-segmental … or the dreaded interspace miscount. Follow these steps when deciding...
Many urologists are using Botox to treat urinary dysfunctions in patients. With no assigned CPT code for the work your urologist performs and varying payer policies on which diagnosis codes are acceptable for...
Global maternal care depends on the method the ob-gyn uses to determine if a patient is pregnant, but coding for the clinical diagnosis of the pregnancy becomes complicated when you have to decide...
Coders often assume that "heart failure" is CHF, and that is not always true.
Millions of people in the U.S. have heart failure, requiring billions of dollars in medical care each year, according...
