Urology Coding Alert

Presented by Jim Collins

Thank you very much Mandy and good morning to everybody across the country who is joining in today.  I am Jim Collins and we are going to be talking about evaluation management documentation and billing, which is really a topic that anybody in the healthcare field knows has been a topic for several years now and one that is really not going to be going away.  So it is an area that we are all somewhat familiar with, just because we have been forced to consider it and a lot of physicians are burdened by these regulations, everybody that bills basically any insurance company in the United States is impacted by these rules.

Clarifications From CMS Make Burden Of E/M Regulations Easier To Bear

The rules are relatively vague; they are gray, they can be interpreted in totally different ways.  However, if we fail to follow these rules or if we ignore the rules, we can be heavily penalized and it makes it very important for people to understand these rules.  I am going to be presenting today a really physician friendly overview of these regulations--and is not even an overview, it is a physician friendly in depth review of these rules.  So, if you have got physicians in the room, they are going to get a lot of benefit from it.  Also if you have people in the conference today that are auditing these services on a regular basis, a compliance officer or internal coders, this is going to be a really beneficial conference for you.  And unlike other conferences that you may have attended or other people you may have talked with about these rules, I am really a strong physician advocate in everything that I do and as you will see in the content we are going to present today, there have been several key clarifications that I personally received from CMS through my advocacy efforts that make these rules much less burdensome than you might previously think they are to you.

I have gotten, directly from CMS in writing, several clarifications that take the mountain of these regulations and turn them into a molehill that, really if physicians take the time to understand these regulations and put in place the tools that I'll present to you today to help make these things less of a burden and less confusing, doctors can actually decrease the amount of time that they spend documenting services and increase the revenue and do it 100% safely and compliantly and in an audit proof fashion.  So, that is really the goal today, to get you in the right ball park on these rules take a little bit of the complexity out of [...]