Check your clinicians’ licenses or pay for the mistake later. That’s a lesson Agape Hospice Care of Northeast Georgia has learned the hard way. Agape has agreed to pay $250,993 for violating the Civil Monetary Penalties Law by submitting claims [...]
Remember that separate E/M code is allowed. No matter how commonplace a test your urologist performs might be, you should always make sure you can prove medical necessity and thus support the need for the service. In last month’s issue [...]
Final rule follows through on proposed increases to GIP, CHC, and IRC. Providers that mostly furnish Routine Home Care or GIP in other facilities are getting the bad end of the deal in Medicare’s payment rebalancing between care levels. Why? [...]
Which category will you fall into? As of Oct. 1, Medicare will pay significantly more for advanced levels of care and less for Routine Home Care days — and that may drastically change the financial picture for the majority of [...]
Start using new and revised codes Oct. 1, 2019. With 273 additions, 21 deletions, and 30 revisions to ICD-10-CM 2020, you can’t afford to ignore changes that could impact your lab. Remember: Pathologists often assign diagnosis codes based on findings [...]
Plus, you’ll have new symptom codes to add to your coding cache. You’ve got a new list of ICD-10-CM codes to consider for 2020. Anyone who’s played the diagnosis coding game knows these codes go into effect on October 1, [...]
Watch your spelling with one tiny descriptor shift. CMS has released the first look at updates to ICD-10-CM for the next year with so few changes to urology-associated diagnoses that they could be easy to miss. Here’s your quick look [...]
Tip: Look at your GIP contracts closely for a break. Hospices that furnish mostly Routine Home Care visits will see a drop in payment next year, if a new proposed rule is finalized. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services [...]
So-called ‘budget-neutral’ rebalancing will really mean a cut to hospice pay. After years of criticizing that Routine Home Care visits are overpaid, Medicare is doing something about it — and it will cost hospices. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid [...]
Turn to op report for tumor site. As a pathology or lab coder, maybe you’ve sometimes wished for a different or more-specific diagnosis code to report a condition. Starting this fall, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) delivers. The [...]
