My cousin was 45 years old and suffered a heart attack when closing his pool for the season. He went from admission for his heart attack to heart catheterization to coronary artery bypass graft to placement on the transplant list. Quite a blow for a man who served his country during the Vietnam War and then working at the local factory...

A common industry standard among business office operations around the country is the routine calculation of each patient accounts' Expected Reimbursement Amount, or ERA. Expected Reimbursement Amount is automatically calculated and stored by the hospitals' contract management system for each patient visit.

A year after the much-hyped switch to the ICD-10 diagnostic coding library, healthcare providers now face pressures to assign codes with the right degree of specificity or risk claim denials.