Freestanding Emergency Rooms and Ambulance Billing – Part II Our Thanks! Welcome to Part II of our series “Freestanding Emergency Rooms and Ambulance Billing.” Our blog posts, this week and last week, is presented thanks to timely reminders passed onto us by Doug Wolfberg of Page, Wolfberg and Wirth. Doug spent the day with our […]
To Bill or Not to Bill? Shakespearian EMS? We can only wonder what the documentation would look like if the great bard Shakespeare would have been a member of the EMS community. “Dispatheth via troubadour to yonder hamlet for a person swooning with the vapors.” Okay…enough of that. But we borrow a take on the […]
The Power of the “Pre-Auth”! Necessary Evil! The American healthcare picture has increasingly become more complex. The advent of the Affordable Care Act and other changes have ushered in literally thousands of new healthcare insurance coverage options. These options change all the time and each year new plans with new rules and requirements spring up. […]
Setting the “Stage” Landing the Series Today we’re landing the “Documentation Review as a Habit” series. Our seventh and final installment of this series focuses on documenting the “stage” of the patient’s illness or injury in the Patient Care Report (PCR) and the importance of doing so. For Emergencies and Beyond When documenting the 9-1-1 […]
Location, Location, Location Last Week Last week we launched a new blog series focusing on the need for creating a habit of reviewing Patient Care Report documentation. As we unpackaged that discussion, we drilled into the documentation needed to support medical necessity and as such the documentation needed to support the ultimate diagnosis coding of […]
Documentation Review as a Habit Put it on the calendar! Because more than ever before, detailed clear clinical documentation in the Patient Care Report (PCR) is critical to the mission, it’s time for every EMS agency to pick a date and time to regularly meet and discuss run sheet documentation. Of course, this blog space is […]
3 Things Your Billing Office Staff Wish You Knew “I am a Human Being” Sometimes your billing office staff feels just like the 19th Century’s John Merrick from the classic 1980 movie Elephant Man. We just want to cry out in desperation… “I am not an animal. I am not an animal. I am a […]
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 […]
Documenting “Right Now” In the Moment… When assisting in documentation training for EMS providers, a common emphasis is made to continually reinforce the necessity of documenting the patient’s condition right now in the Patient Care Report. We find it especially important to stress this important concept when educating providers who are handling a fairly consistent […]
“Trick or Treat” – Documenting Child EMS Scenarios Little Ghouls and Goblins… Tomorrow is the day the little ghouls and goblins make their rounds to collect more sugar than any parent should ever allow their children to have. It’s almost Halloween! So, what better time than to offer some suggestions regarding documenting EMS treatment and […]
