Four Valuable Tips to Combat your Medical Coding Concerns in 2017

The timetable on the calendar may state that ICD-10 transition move is still a long one; however practices will probably feel its repercussions in 2017 as far as payer requests, denials, and the new code set's impact on patient care and consideration. As we transit into 2017, practices ought to begin being proactive with the coding activities at their facility.

Here are four valuable tips to combat your medical coding concerns for the year 2017.

1. Collaboration and Team effort
   At the doctor's office everything from data capture to patient care and consideration, all obligations can no longer fall exclusively on doctors' shoulders. Executing work processes that permit clinical staff to comprehend and share documentation duties can lessen the burden from doctors. For example, nursing staff members can record the mammograms or HbA1c tests required for value based payment programs. The point that we want to make here is that sharing the doctor's workload, especially in medical billing and coding task, and collaborating on other undertaking can combat the coding requirements of the practice.
2. Training the staff to be more prepared
   ICD-10, MACRA/MIPS and value based systems by and large oblige practices to adopt a more complex strategy to Revenue Cycle Management than ever before. Raising the staff ability and knowledge to a more précised coding and billing understanding is vital, however doesn't need to be handled alone. Practices can very well adopt the method of outsourcing medical billing and coding services to offshore vendors that have the required knowledge and expertise, to handle billing and coding in a streamlined manner with less or no errors.
3. MACRA
   It's important that practices comprehend the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and more particularly, the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS). As per the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions 2016 Survey of US Physicians, half of doctors say they have never known about MACRA. This makes it important for all practices, even those with few Medicare patients, to focus on the effect this bellwether enactment has on documentation, coding and repayment.
   As a result, MACRA/MIPS are CMS' consolidation of the Physician Quality Reporting System, Meaningful Use and the Value-Based Modifier programs. Quality measures include about half of the doctor's MIPS point score, which makes it basic for practices to precisely catch and code data identified with quality of care indicators. The MACRA/MIPS pioneer can assemble instructional data about the program from doctor's specialty trade organizations to educate the practice and execute procedures to satisfy its necessities in the year 2017.
4. Coding Precision and Precise Documentation
   While precision has dependably been essential, its significance is unparalleled now because of two developments: the increased specificity of ICD-10, and the quality based necessities of value based care models. Both of these things are convincing insurance providers to report more definite data, which positively adds to significant workloads and that have been evaluated to add 1 to 2 hours for every work day.
   Rather than attempting to spare time and creating a billing compliance risk by utilizing a cut-and-paste documentation approach, a superior strategy is to empower doctors to quickly catch discrete information in the electronic health record utilizing the software's advanced documentation functionality, while offering the add unstructured notes when essential.
   Maybe the best indicator that a practice is documenting, coding and billing precisely is its claim denial rate. If doctors are seeing denial rates grow from their pre-ICD-10 baselines, they must conduct a careful assessment as to how their in-house accounting department is working on the coding prerequisites.

If you feel that your accounting department is not up to the mark in completing their job, and are not knowledgeable enough for the ICD-10 transitions for the year 2017, allotting the work to an outsourced medical billing and coding company will be of great advantage and will streamline the revenue cycle management as well.

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Published By - Medical Billers and Coders
Published Date - Dec-13-2016 Back