The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released a proposal to increase Medicare payments to hospitals for the care that they provide on an outpatient basis. The new proposal...
US Medicaid Enrollment Reaches 6.7 Million
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aims to expand the health insurance coverage to millions of Americans through a combination of public programs and private-sector health insurance expansions. A recent...
CMS Clarifies “Incident to” Relating to Pharmacist Services
According to the communication between the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Physicians may bill for pharmacist services as...
Complicated EHR Implementation May Create Patient Safety Issues
Electronic health records (EHR) is a patient centric information resource for physicians that represent a major domain of health information technology (HIT). The EHR system facilitates improved...
ICD-10 Delay – Its Impact on Students
Healthcare providers, insurance payers and vendors aren't the only entities that are affected by the unexpected ICD-10 delay of more than a year. Delay in implementing this coding system is...
How Powerful a Beacon is HEDIS?
If you'd want to compare HEDIS to something, a lighthouse wouldn't be too far-fetched an object of comparison. Quite like the way it guides ships, HEDIS guides people to sign up for the right health...
IMS Health Study Reveals a Surge in U.S. Health Care Usage During 2013
The IMS Institute of Healthcare Informatics released a report in 2013 entitled 'Medicine Use and Shifting Costs of Healthcare: A Review of the Use of Medicines in the United States in 2013' that...
“Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014” Comes as a Relief to Physicians
On April 1, 2014, President Barack Obama passed the legislation, Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014 that enacts a 13-month temporary patch for the sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula and...
COPD Coding Precautions
Assigning the ICD-9-CM Diagnosis Code 496 is not as simple as it looks. ICD-09-CM code 496 indicates chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD which is defined as chronic airway obstruction, not...