EMS Facing Uncertainty in 2017 Happy New Year! We’re just two weeks from shouting Happy New Year! The year 2017 is just around the corner and the ambulance industry faces unusual uncertainties surrounding funding and reimbursements in the upcoming year. Just before we begin the two-week celebration of Christmas and...
OIG Announces New Ambulance AKS Safe Harbor Breaking News The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a new rule pertaining to government-owned and operated ambulance providers and suppliers this week regarding the waiving of Medicare copayments and deductibles for emergency ambulance services under the Federal Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS). 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...
New Stuff From Medicare Two Updates Two recent Medicare updates carrying a potential impact on your EMS agency’s cash flow, complete with compliance implications popped up on our radar screen recently. Today’s blog will focus on those two updates. MUEs The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently updated the...
Historic Election- Now What? You’ve Lived History How many of you stayed up most, if not all night on Election Day? As EMS providers, most of us are used to weird hours and sleep deprivation anyway. Even if you were alerted for a call, our guess is you found yourself huddled...
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...
It’s All in the Timing Part VI Our “Documentation Review as a Habit” series rolls into Part VI with a discussion about capturing timing in the Patient Care Report’s (PCR’s) documentation. Not only is there an importance placed on documenting the correct date and time of the incident, chronologically, but...
Documenting Causation for Illnesses V. Our “Documentation as a Habit” series moves on to Part V this week. In it, we’ll discuss causation or the synonym we use a lot in healthcare terminology, etiology. Last week we talked about mechanism of injury which is basically the trauma part of any...
Mechanism- External Cause of Injuries Next Thanks for returning for Part IV of the “Documentation as a Habit” series. This is the fourth week of this series where we have paused to take a look at the need for EMS agencies to be intentional about Patient Care Report documentation reviews. In this series,...
How Severe is Severe? Part III Welcome to Part III of our “Documentation as a Habit” series! Two weeks ago we embarked on this series noting the necessity for EMS agencies to be intentional about Patient Care Report documentation review. The series focused on explaining the coding considerations that every...
