Accelerated Medical Practice Blog

Data storage and software applications are using machine learning to derive a patient’s diagnosis. The intensity of individual pixels in images over a period of time can be analyzed to help detect lung cancer patients.  Machine learning applications are used to derive a diagnosis by storing and analyzing years of demographic information for thousands of patients. When a new patient arrives who is similar to a filtered base in the large data store, the archived information is...

White Plume’s product suite provides the use of medical coding content to help coders and back office personnel insure claims are as clean as possible to increase the efficiency of the submission process. One of the challenges with managing coding content is that the data often changes. To insure that customers are benefiting from the most up to date coding content, upgrades should be completed on a quarterly basis. White Plume’s new Content Upgrade Assistant has...

Many medical coding solutions and claim scrubbers promise a way to recover the savings from automating the charge entry process when using an EMR template. When looking for a solution, realize the ideal solution should not be an afterthought or one feature on a list of a hundred features. A coding solution should be carefully examined to determine: What types of rules does it include When are these rules applied Who reviews these errors and makes...

One of the most famous examples of the law of unintended consequences is Kudzu. Introduced to the United States in 1876, the plant was originally intended as erosion control. Currently spreading at a rate of 150,000 acres per year, the plant will overtake everything in its path when left unchecked. What are the unintended consequences created by your EMR implementation? Think back to charge entry employees. Usually, when keying charges into the PM system, the process is more complicated than simple data entry....

Providers are fighting to be reimbursed for every dollar. Getting reimbursed properly requires back office staffs to diligently pay attention to changes in payor rules. Barriers to Proper Reimbursement It is not unusual to hear horror stories from billers regarding denials by payors. Some private payors appear to deny all claims the first time they are submitted, even if the claims are documented correctly. Other problems may involve payors changing the rules so frequently that a service which...

When you look at the typical project plan for an EMR implementation, the clinical components are typically the focal point: template selection and customization, physician training, clinical workflow, etc. Automating the charge capture and coding elements are usually placed at the bottom of the work list and may never be fully implemented. This gap in implementation planning often results in practices being forced to produce costly, manual workarounds as needed. This is a dangerous financial hazard...

When many EMRs were originally designed, charge capture and coding was not a major design objective. As an ancillary feature and benefit of EMRs—untested in the real world—that EMRs could replace the superbill began to appear in sales presentations. 

"Mind the gap" is a warning for passengers to take caution while crossing the gap between the train door and the railway platform. Introduced in 1969 on the London Underground, this warning also serves physician practices well as they pursue the important goal of implementing an electronic medical record (EMR). 

As you prepare for the ICD-10 changeover on October 1, 2013, what will you do with your paper superbill?

The new 5010 claim standard is driving new requirements in drug reporting, specifically for drug quantity and the unit of measure.