Many readers may remember the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Transmittal 534. This was released in early August 2014, and it would have given Medicare contractors the ability to automatically deny associated physician claims when a hospital claim was denied. As written, if an inpatient admission was denied for...

A new collaboration between the AMA and UnitedHealthcare will work to address the social and environmental factors that affect patients’ health by standardizing data collection on their social determinants of health (SDOH) to help address individuals’ unique needs that often go unmet.

Modifiers are the key to overriding Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) edits, so let’s give them the attention they deserve. We’ll start with a recent rule update and move on to helpful hints about CCI-associated modifiers in general. Which CCI edits? Our focus here will be Medicare CCI Procedure-to-Procedure (PTP) edits for physicians and practitioners.

Although International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) took effect on Oct. 1, 2015, there still are many gaps in the understanding and use of the code set. ICD-10-CM is the standard transaction code set for diagnostic purposes under the Health Insurance...

CMS has provided ICD-10-CM coding updates for fiscal year 2020 that include 273 additions 21 deletions and 30 revisions, according to the American Health Information Management Association. The 21 deletions for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2019, and ending Sept. 30: