January 19, 2020 | By Sean Weiss, CHC, CEMA, CMCO, CPMA, CPC-P, CMPE, CPC Welcome to 2020! It is my hope that all of you had a great holiday season and New Year and are well-rested and ready to take on the challenges of this new year head-on and armed with the necessary…
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January 24, 2020 | By Frank Cohen, Director of Analytics and Busines Intelligence The first thing to note is that I am not an auditor. So, for me to write an article on auditing tips might seem a bit out of place. But this is not an article on auditing compliance but rather…
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March 6, 2020 | By Paul Spencer, CPC, COC Something of a preemptive celebration is currently going on in the world of physician documentation. As we know, beginning in January 2021, CMS will modify documentation guidelines for evaluation & management services to put more of an emphasis on medical decision making, rather than…
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March 13, 2020 | By Jesse Overbay, JD Readers of this newsletter and followers of the incredibly talented individuals on the NAMAS team know that conducting internal monitoring and auditing remains one of the seven fundamental elements of an effective compliance plan.[1] Monitoring and auditing within a medical practice or hospital system encompasses many…
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March 20, 2020 | By Shannon DeConda, CPC, CPC-1, CPMA, CEMC, CMSCS Step 1: Telehealth Consent In order to conduct a patient encounter as a telehealth service, the patient must consent to this modality. The consent should include the patient’s explicit agreement to being treated via telehealth rather than in a face-to-face encounter. Each…
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March 23, 2020 | By Rachel Rose, JD, MBA According to the National Institute for Standards and Technology (“NIST”), biometrics is defined as, “[a]utomated recognition of individuals based on their behavioral and biological characteristics [e.g., fingerprints, facial recognition and retinal scans]. In this document, biometrics may be used to unlock authentication tokens and prevent repudiation…
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March 27, 2020 | By Grant Huang, CPC, CPMA The recent coronavirus crisis has brought non-face-to-face services to the forefront of coding and billing conversations. With the entire healthcare industry focused on caring for patients during an unprecedented and fast-moving pandemic, the goal of increasing patient access while reducing the risk of spreading infection…
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April 3, 2020 | By Sean Weiss, CHC, CEMA, CMCO, CPMA, CPC-P, CMPE, CPC Happy Friday – we made it through another week of change, after change, after change. There have been a lot of side-stepping and dancing around to get to where we are now. I have told clients for weeks that there…
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April 10, 2020 | By Jill Young, CPC, CEDC, CIMC The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its ICD-10 documentation guidelines for COVID-19, using the newly adopted code U07.1. You can find the CDC’s guidance document here https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/COVID-19-guidelines-final.pdf. The information shows an effective date range from April 1, 2020 through September 30,…
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April 17, 2020 | By Priscilla J. Alfaro, MD, FAAP, CPC, CPMA, COC, CFE ICD-10 was finally officially implemented on October 1, 2015. One of the intents of moving to ICD-10 was to enable and encourage reporting diagnoses with a higher level of specificity. Many payers expect claims to contain specific codes to support the…
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