Navigating E/M Reporting: Time-Based Billing and Separately Reported Services

March 29, 2024 | By: Teresa Schrage, RDCS, RVT, CPC, CPMA Reporting an E/M with separately reported services continues to be a topic of discussion amongst coders, auditors, and providers. First, let’s review what a significant, separately reported E/M is and what identifies the service. An E/M is significant and separately identifiable from a procedure/service…

Supervision of Ancillary Staff

April 26, 2024 | Sean M. Weiss, CHC, CEMA, CMCO, CPMA, CPC-P, CMPE, CPC  The perennial inquiry into the scope of services that nurses and ancillary support staff may offer under physician supervision remains a frequent topic of discussion. Furthermore, I frequently encounter situations where the concept of “incident-to” care is central to the controversy.…

First Line Defense: Preventing Denials Through Patient Eligibility Verification

March 22, 2024 | By Carol Ittig, MBA, CMPE Introduction: In the fast-paced world of healthcare billing, clean claims are the key to maximizing revenue and minimizing headaches. A significant contributor to claim denials is inaccurate patient eligibility information. This article explores a multi-step approach to patient eligibility verification, empowering your team to submit clean…

Understanding Chronic and Principal Care Management Services (CCM vs. PCM)

  September 29, 2023 | By Grant Huang, CPMA, CPC If you’ve never heard of principal care management (PCM) or chronic care management (CCM) services before, you’re not alone. Medicare introduced these new benefits for Part B beneficiaries in 2021 and 2022, respectively, but the agency’s own utilization data shows that adoption has been fairly…

Break a Leg! Audit Hazards in Orthopedic Medicine

March 15, 2024 | By Sonal Patel, BA, CPMA, CPC, CMC | CEO & Principal Strategist at SP Collaborative, LLC Introduction Did you know that under-documenting poses an audit hazard for any specialty provider? This is not spoken about too loudly by payors since their primary focus is identifying overpayments, rather than underpayments. Nevertheless, I…