Sign on the Dotted Line! Properly Obtaining Patient Signatures in the Field. By Chuck Humphrey, B.A., EMT-B, CAC, CACO, CADS * Can you boast a 100% signature rate? In my 37 years of EMS field experience, I can boast a 100% patient signature success rate…NOT! It’s a joke that circulates between my EMS billing […]
Medicare Prior Authorization Expansion- What Does It Mean for You? By Chuck Humphrey, B.A., CAC, CACO, CADS, EMT-B* The Time Has Come Unless you are Rip Van Winkle and you’ve been snoozing for a long, long winter’s nap, I’m hoping by now that you are aware that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) […]
Transported for HIGHER Level of Care By Katie Harrison and Chuck Humphrey, QMC Compliance Team If we had a dollar… Here in our QMC billing office, if we had a dollar for every time we have opened a patient care report (PCR) to read the documentation of an ambulance transport from one facility to another […]
Medicare Appeals By Kellie Mattos, C.A.C. How to be a WINNER with Medicare appeals. Medicare appeals can be time-consuming and tedious with, frequently, no positive outcome for your effort. Today I am going to talk about the importance of appeals and how to win them! Anatomy of an Appeal- Time Consuming and Tedious When a […]
Hurricane Dorian Prompts CMS Emergency Efforts Breaking News Literally, as we contribute to this blog space, our fellow Americans in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic States are experiencing the dramatic effects of the monster Hurricane Dorian. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has just issued Medicare Learning Network (MLN) Special Editions (SEs) 19017 (Puerto Rico), […]
Medicare Changes Proposed Last Week Big news hit the ambulance industry’s electronic inboxes last week, when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the calendar year 2020 Proposed Rule with revisions to Payment Policies under the Physician Fee Schedule including Other Changes to Part B Payment Policies. Two ambulance industry changes were embedded […]
4 Important Things EMS Field Practices to Aid Billing Billing is Important! As an EMS provider in the field, if you think you can ignore what goes on in the office- especially the billing part- then you don’t see the bigger picture. Billing is important! Modern EMS is expensive. Most trucks are now a 6-figure […]
Supporting Upgrades in Care Using Detailed Documentation Dispatched to…Arrived to Find You’re riding an ALS rig today, the BLS crew is tied up and you and your partner are dispatched by default for a call that has been determined via EMD to be a BLS Emergency for a patient with back pain. You respond accordingly […]
Documenting Cardiac Arrests for Billing Challenging Scenarios We’re sure that you’ll agree with us that patient cardiac arrests present the most challenging of scenarios EMS providers encounter in the field. Documenting arrest scenarios also presents challenges following the run. Once we have had time to step back and think about the event, that’s when we […]
Influenza. The Ambulance. Documentation. An Annual Topic It’s flu season once again. Given that this blog originates from a desk located in the northeastern United States, we can tell you that the flu has hit here with a vengeance. H1N1 is back to visit and was predominantly prevalent across the United States with influenza A […]
