Stress and life style changes causing high blood pressure, cholesterol and smoking, are often cited as key factors for heart disease. Heart attacks earlier affected only men, but today the generic, “Cardiovascular disease” is known to kill irrespective of gender, and is estimated that 84 million Americans suffer from it. More colossal, is the direct healthcare costs - around $315 million and rising every year! The new ICD-10 coding system used for reporting morbidity and mortality patterns worldwide helps healthcare departments to sync with new medical diagnosis and treatments. In order for the ICD-10 implementation to be successful, certain assessments and knowledge processes need to be readied for the ICD-10 transition from the old, obsolete ICD-9. The computer-aided systems and training for coders and healthcare providers need to be implemented and enacted upon immediately. Every delay will lead to disruption in healthcare delivery innovation, public healthcare payment reform and spending. Can cardiologists take the hit in their already declining revenues, and the State in its healthcare spending?
How does ICD-10 transition affect revenue cycles? If not coded as per the new ICD-10 codes, the denial of insurance claim reimbursements will be high, nearly $30 loss of every claim filed wrongly. Multiply that by the number of patients with heart disease walking into your practice daily! A case in point, coronary atherosclerosis and angina pectoris can both exist in a patient. ICD-10 provides combination codes, in addition to the specific site that is affected by coronary atherosclerosis and additional codes have been provided to indicate additional causes, not present in the earlier ICD-9. Thus, awareness among physicians, medical coders and billers, on how the various diseases and its ailments can be classified and coded is very essential to push change in quality research and healthcare spending, and thereby improve and increase cardiologists revenues via properly filed health claims.
Outsourcing cardiology billing services is one way of decreasing the high rates of denial claims once ICD-10 comes into force. Moreover, although the Medicare fee has increased by 1.1percent for other healthcare providers, yet for cardiologists there has been a noted 2 percent decrease. This together with poor quality of billing processes and coding errors, your revenues can dip further. The billing issues can be ironed out by solutions provided by the expert billing services providers, who can assist as in-house billers and coders - trained to handle the coding and aware of how to process claims knowing the denial claims cited by cardiology insurance players. This reduces the denial management process improving the rate of claim reimbursements. Cardiology physicians, can thus concentrate on their quality diagnostic techniques and treatments by outsourcing their billing and coding services.
