Ready for Visitors? Open Doors Spring is here and that probably means that the doors to your station will be open for some much-needed fresh air. We need to be aware that the public we serve may show up at our stations and offices from time to time. When that happens, will we be ready? […]
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 […]
Freestanding Emergency Rooms and Ambulance Billing Training Week This week was a training week for our ambulance billing office. Each year we take a full day out of our normal routine, in addition to our ongoing training regimen, to host a representative from the National Academy of Ambulance Coding for a day of immersed training […]
Flu-Like Symptoms- How to Document? Spring? Spring has sprung…or has it? Given that we just experienced a major east coast winter snow storm just two weeks ago with New England about to get hammered again, it appears that Mother Nature is a bit confused. The Flu! Because Mother Nature is confused we see a lingering […]
A New Age of HIPAA Enforcement – What it Means for EMS by Ryan Stark-Page, Wolfberg & Wirth, LLC (Originally featured in the Zoll Data Blog on March 23, 2017; shared to benefit our clients and readers.) In 2016, the Heath Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) police levied far more penalties than ever before, […]
Sharpening Documentation Skills Using Hands-On Training How will they learn? The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the early church in Rome to encourage the early first-century believers to actively share their faith with others. He used a series of questions to make his point. “But how can they call on him to save them […]
Servanthood- A Tribute to Bill In Tribute We take a detour today from our usual ambulance billing topic to pay tribute to a gentleman giant of EMS. We hope you read on to learn more about this individual who represented the very spirit and mission of what EMS should be all about. The Coal Region […]
What Service is Not Available? Inter-Facility Transfers This week’s blog will focus on inter-facility transports. For the most part we’ll discuss hospital-to-hospital transfers where the patient has been treated at one hospital but must move to a different hospital in most cases for care that is not provided at the facility where they currently are […]
Clear. Clinical. Documentation. CMS Three words with impactful meaning anchor our discussion today. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sets the definition of medical necessity of an ambulance patient that all of us in the ambulance billing industry strictly adhere to. The definition centers on the clinical requirement “where the use of other methods […]
Facilities and Payment- Medicare Rules Destination Facility Our billing office often receives questions from our clients regarding facilities as an origin yet mostly a destination for transport. For the purpose of this discussion we are going to focus on the destination. A facility or institution is defined as a hospital or skilled nursing home as […]
