The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services intends to assess the health care industry’s disposition for transitioning to the HIPAA 5010 transaction sets and ICD-10 code sets.

Through a web-based survey inviting insurers, providers and vendors this summer. It will look into the status of their transition process by looking at milestone benchmarks set . . . → Read More: Are You Ready for 5010/ICD-10?

The FDA issued on April 18 a rule governing the use of medical device data systems, implementing guidelines for IT companies that develop medical devices for health care providers.

This rule, promulgated by the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, impacts hardware manufacturers introducing new mobile medical devices for use by health care . . . → Read More: New FDA Rule Regarding Medical Device Data Systems Takes Effect

Joseph Goedert  of Health Data Management reported recently that an analysis of 43,600 patient accounts in a leading hospital shows that when a family’s spending on health care exceeds 3.5 percent of income, a tipping point is reached on the ability to pay. While this finding helped the hospital manage individual struggling with settling . . . → Read More: Kink in Patient Payments

To appreciate the role medical transcriptions play in the clinical documentation work flow it is important to understand the role of medical clearinghouses

Medical clearinghouses process processing millions of transactions each year. They have the thankless job of dealing  with hundreds of thousands of different practice software, pushing out claims to over 4000 different . . . → Read More: Medical Transcriptions and Medical Clearinghouses

From the “retrospective cost-based reimbursement” system (1965) where Medicare reconciled interim payments to hospitals against  “allowable costs”  where costs skyrocketed, to the 1982, Congress mandated the creation of a prospective payment system (PPS) to control costs. Congress entertained different systems to control costs and settled on a prospective payment system predicated on a per-case . . . → Read More: How DRG Rates Are Calculated