Category: Blog

Brief:  CMS Administrator Seema Verma on Tuesday said the agency will not approve any state requests to put lifetime coverage limits on Medicaid beneficiaries.  Earlier this month, CMS rejected Kansas’ request to place a three-year lifetime limit on Medicaid benefits. Still, four other states have requested similar Medicaid waivers: Utah, Arizona, Maine and Wisconsin.  Despite […]

Clinical diagnostic laboratories can look forward to 12 new laboratory codes were effective April 1 and one code effective retroactively January 1. The Centers for Medicare and Medicate Services (CMS) released the changes May 5, 2018. The new codes are contractor priced until addressed at the annual Clinical Laboratory Public Meeting in July. All the […]

The importance of an effective outpatient CDI program cannot be overstated We all know that getting the most accurate and appropriate documentation has always been an issue. Trying to clarify documentation to obtain the most accurate diagnosis coding has expanded to more and more areas, moving from inpatients with DRGs to outpatient with APCs, and […]

Skilled nursing facilities could face a new Medicare reimbursement system that pays based on patient conditions and needs, rather than volume of services provided. CMS recently proposed updates to several post-acute care prospective payment systems, with skilled nursing facilities seeing a potentially new Medicare reimbursement arrangement, called the Patient Driven Payment Model. The Patient Driven […]

After patients have a subcortical stroke in the right hemisphere of their brain, more than one in three experience cognitive decline. That decline may be the result of damage to specific pathways in the brain, according to a new study published in Radiology. “Impairment of attention has been observed in patients with both cortical and […]

Medpac Suggests Cutting Medicare Reimbursement For Stand-alone Emergency Departments The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) recently voted to reduce Medicare reimbursement by 30 percent for off-campus stand-alone emergency departments (ED) in urban areas. The recommendation will be included in the commission’s June 2018 report to Congress. MedPAC expressed concerns that stand-alone EDs in urban areas resulted in […]

Dive Brief:​ Spending on vendor-provided federal health IT goods and services is estimated to increase from $6.1 billion this year to $8.1 billion in 2023, according to a Health IT News summary of a market outlook report. That increase will largely be driven by EHR projects at the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs. Spending will top […]

Seniors often found out only when they got surprise bills for the services Medicare doesn’t cover for observation patients. Under a new federal law, hospitals across the country must now alert Medicare patients when they are getting observation care and why they were not admitted — even if they stay in the hospital a few […]

The Louisville-based Humana is expanding a value-based payment model into seven additional states, while the Medicare agency has yet to set a clear course for how to handle such models. Humana announced last week it would start offering its bundled payment model for hip and knee replacements under Medicare Advantage plans to members in Alabama, […]

The ICD-10-CM Tabular List of Diseases and Injuries 2018 Addenda provides insight to future diagnosis coding. Let’s review what is new, deleted, and revised in chapters 1-7. In future months, we will cover additional chapters. Chapter 1: Certain Infectious and Parasitic Diseases (A00-A09) Two codes are added under A04.7: A04.71 Enterocolitis due to Clostridium difficile, […]