June 26, 2020 | By Holly Cassano, CPC, CRC As we move through the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us in health care are finding that many opinions and much guidance exists on the topic of telehealth/telemedicine, from many various sources. At the beginning of the COVID-19 public health emergency, the rules literally seemed to change…
June 19, 2020 | By Grant Huang, CPC, CPMA The hype surrounding next year’s implementation of new guidelines for documenting and coding Evaluation & Management (E&M) services has revolved around the virtual elimination of the history and physical exam as key components of code selection. But some of the lesser-known changes involving…
February 21, 2020 | By Pam Vanderbilt, CPC, CPMA, CPPM, CPC-I, CEMC, CEMA, CEMA-O In the first three articles of this series, we explored how the 2021 E&M changes to office visits will affect each element of medical decision making (MDM): diagnoses, data, and the table of risk. In this article, we…
February 14, 2020 | By Pam Vanderbilt, CPC, CPMA, CPPM, CPC-I, CEMC, CEMA, CEMA-O Next year will see the implementation of significant changes to E&M guidelines, reducing the emphasis on the history and exam components while highlighting medical decision making (M.D.M.). In our last audit tip on the E&M changes, we discussed…
February 7, 2020 | By Pam Vanderbilt, CPC, CPMA, CPPM, CPC-I, CEMC, CEMA, CEMA-O Previously we explored the 2021 changes that effect how diagnoses will be scored. Today we will dive into the changes to the data element of MDM. We know the year 2021 will bring significant changes to how we…
January 31, 2020 | By Pam Vanderbilt, CPC, CPMA, CPPM, CPC-I, CEMC, CEMA, CEMA-O The year 2021 will bring significant changes to how we determine the level of evaluation and management services in the outpatient setting. We will no longer score history and exam elements, instead focusing on medical decision making or…