Talk Ten Tuesdays

It’s all about the money. It’s not only getting paid, but also getting paid the right amount. Little wonder that this is first and foremost on every provider’s mind. Often, though, success or failure lies in the completion and details of medical notes taken.

So, what’s the deal with medical notes? Why are notes so important, and why are they difficult for providers to complete? We’ve invited Kevin Lasser, Co-founder and CEO of TiaTe...

ICD10monitor correspondent Linda Holtzman, founder of Clarity Coding, will return to the Talk Ten Tuesdays (TTT) broadcast this coming Tuesday, March 7 to report on the activities at the Coordination & Maintenance Committee (C&M) meeting taking place from the headquarters of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

Holtzman, a longtime C&M observer, will bring her knowledge and expertise to her reporting o...

We will conclude our month-long observance of American Heart Month on the Talk Ten Tuesdays weekly Internet radio broadcast with an upcoming guest appearance of Cardiologist Harry B. Peled, MD with St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, Calif.

Last Tuesday, Dr. Mahesh Amin reported on the use of new protocols centered on high-sensitivity troponins for the diagnosis of type 2 myocardial infarction (MI). The response to his appearance ...

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued its approval of using new protocols centered on high-sensitivity troponins for the diagnosis of type 2 myocardial infarction (MI).

Reporting our lead story during the next edition of Talk Ten Tuesdays will be Dr. Mahesh Amin, CV Service Line Medical Director for BayCare Health Systems in Clearwater, Fla., a board-certified cardiologist.

This story, along with a Feb. 28 report b...

In continuing our observance of American Heart Month, during the next live edition of the Talk Ten Tuesdays live Internet radio broadcast we will zero in on the topic of coding and clinical documentation integrity (CDI) issues related to cardiovascular procedures – and, specifically, the importance of obtaining pre-authorizations for cardiology procedures.

Obtaining cardiology procedure pre-authorizations tends to be a time-consumin...

February is American Heart Month, a time to raise awareness of cardiovascular health and to shine the light on cardiac issues, especially myocardial infarction.

Unfortunately, every year about 805,000 people in the United States have a heart attack. Basically, someone has a heart attack every 40 seconds. 

And that is why we invited the Chief Executive Officer for the Innova Revenue Group, Lidiya Ter-Markorova, a clinical documentatio...

As rural hospital closures continue to increase (136 have occurred between 2010 and 2021), health information management (HIM) and clinical documentation improvement (CDI) professionals have key roles in ensuring revenue integrity and optimization essential to sound operations and access. 

Even so, small facilities, especially those operating independently, simply do not have the resources that larger chains have to negotiate favora...

Who knew that when the venerable American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) combining two hospital encounter service types into one code set of inpatient/observation services – initial and subsequent – consternation would be the outcome. The confusion: what entity can actually bill an inpatient initial code, 99221-99223, and who must default to subsequent codes or report office and other outpatient codes when seeing patients in the obs...

The term “DRG mismatches” is most often used to describe situations wherein the working diagnosis-related group (DRG) selected by the clinical documentation improvement specialist (CDIS) differs from the final coded DRG, signaling that the CDIS and the coder have arrived at different principal diagnoses. In other situations, a procedure may have been coded incorrectly by the CDI professional, causing the DRG mismatch.

But here’s goo...

Within the hospital setting, the term “mismatch” is most often used to describe a situation wherein the final working diagnosis-related group (DRG) selected by the clinical documentation improvement (CDISs) specialists from the final coded DRG.

This can be due to many reasons. One of the most frequent reasons is that the CDI professional and coder have arrived at a different principal diagnosis. In other situations, a CC (complicati...

Telehealth is considered to be rendered at the physical location of the patient, and therefore a provider typically needs to be licensed in the patient’s state. When the public health emergency (PHE) was declared in March of 2020, most states, followed the federal exceptions under the 1135 CARES Act waivers, allowing, an out-of-state provider to render services via telemedicine in a state where they are not located, or allow a clin...

New codes. Old codes. Deleted codes. ICD-10 codes, evaluation and management (E&M) codes, and Z codes.

It’s raining codes, and during the next live edition of Talk Ten Tuesdays, you’ll hear the very latest coding news – along with all you need to know to keep you performing at the top of your game.

The live broadcast will also feature these other segments:

• CDI Report: Cheryl Ericson, a recognized clinical documentation integri...

Be sure to join us for the next live edition of Talk Ten Tuesdays, when Karen Bartrom, director of clinical integration and documentation at Cameron Memorial Hospital in Indiana, will report on how Z codes – the social determinants of health (SDoH) and ICD-10-CM codes – can reveal insights related to the health of a community.

With the mapping of patient SDoH responses to Z-codes, valuable aggregate data on a community’s health disp...

Will the United States experience another federal public health emergency (PHE) beyond Jan. 11, 2023? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Oct. 13 renewed the PHE for an additional 90 days. Meanwhile, states continue to wait for a 60-day termination warning, as HHS had promised earlier.

Joining the broadcast during the next live edition of the popular Internet radio program Talk Ten Tuesdays will be nationally r...