Friday Night Lights, EMS and ICD-10 It all Begins Tonight! Our billing office headquarters is located in Northeastern Pennsylvania and tonight is one of the biggest nights of the year. High school football is king in Pennsylvania and tonight is the kick-off night for the 2016 season. This reminds us that young people everywhere, even […]
Other Methods of Transportation are Contraindicated Medical Necessity Defined We talk a lot about Medical Necessity in the ambulance billing office. Medical necessity and Reasonableness are key in determining whether or not an insurance payer is obligated to pay for ambulance transport, especially for Medicare and Medicaid patients. Title XVIII of the Social Security Act […]
Insurance Coverage Doesn’t Mean Insurance Payment This year, for the first time in 8 years, we’ll elect a new President in the United States of America. Healthcare issues have been on the radar screen for many years. President Obama brought us the Affordable Care Act or “Obamacare”. Much has been written about the effects of […]
Of “Ambulance Drivers” and “Emergencies” All of the times… Can you count all of the times that you have been labeled an “ambulance driver”? Nearly half a decade removed from the dawn of modern EMS, to our neighbors that’s what we are…ambulance drivers. Regardless of all of the hours you’ve spent training to attain your […]
Be Proud! Shrinking Pool There’s a shrinking pool of EMS providers. We don’t care where you are located, it’s obvious that fewer of us are doing this EMS thing. Quite frankly, it’s a bit scary. News story after news story, report after report chronicles that our numbers are down and the people willing to spend […]
Winter Flu Season- How to Document? Welcome Back! We trust that you had a wonderful holiday season filled with many warm memories. We’re back to our normal routine so let’s dig into a direct documentation topic…. How to document transports that are initiated either directly or indirectly due to the effects of influenza. The Flu! […]
Grading the Documentation Pop Quiz-Scenario 2 Wrapping it up… We wrap up the Our Documentation Quiz, 3-Part series this week with our discussion of “Scenario 2.” If you missed the first week’s post that outlines Scenario 2, use the blog home page to drill down to our post two weeks ago. In the past we […]
Grading the Documentation Pop Quiz-Scenario 1 How did you do? Last week in this space we began a 3-part series that we entitled “Our Documentation Quiz.” If you missed it, we suggest that you skip down and read the post or you’ll be lost by reading this week’s post. We presented two hypothetical EMS scenarios […]
The “Continuous Monitoring” Factor for Inter-facility, Non-emergency Ambulance Transports From the Open Door Forum One of the staples of being an ambulance biller is religiously following any information provided by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Ambulance billers can easily follow CMS by participating in the Ambulance Open Door Forum audio-conferences. The Open […]
Movement Barriers and Medical Necessity Outside-the-Norm Questions Our office receives questions from our EMS agency clients, periodically, regarding patients that have some kind of movement barrier connected to the treatment/transport scenario. These are the patients that have some sort of physical or structural challenge that exists between where they reside and the point where they […]
