Urology Coding Alert

Presented by Kristine Eckis The following supplement to Urology Coding Alert is the transcript of a teleconference presented by The Coding Institute. To obtain the slides for the conference, please log on to our Online Subscription System at http://codinginstitute.com/login and download the current issue, and the slides will be contained therein. If you're not sure how to use the Online Subscription System or need help downloading the issue, please contact our customer service department at 1-800-508-2582 or service@medville.com, and one of our representatives will be able to assist you.

The speaker for the teleconference, Kristine Eckis is President of The Bottom Line Medical Administrative Consultants, Inc. "Bottom Line" celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2005. With 26 years of combined medical and legal experience, Kristine consults with medical practices nationwide providing evaluations and recommendations for operational improvements and accounts receivable management. She also assists with practice start-ups and provides coding education and chart audits, both on and off-site. She is a Board Member of the American Association of Healthcare Consultants and a member of the National Association of Healthcare Consultants and AHIMA. Kristine has been accredited by the American Academy of Professional Coders as a Certified Professional Coder since 1996. Thank you, good afternoon everybody.  During the past 10 years, I have evaluated numerous practices and I have presented hundreds of coding seminars and at the various practices or through interaction with the attendees, I am always amazed at the amount of money that practices are losing and it really bothers me.  I do not like to see clients leaving money on the table.  The other thing is this loss repents pure profit, you have already covered your overhead, so anything that you are leaving out there is just absolutely profit and this is either due to incorrect coding for the service or the procedure that is being provided, or it is failing to bill for it all.  There are a lot of services that we provide that we do not know we can bill for.  So the distressing fact is that even today I continue to uncover the same types of problems in medical practices.  So I am glad to have this opportunity to share some of the information I found with you and I hope you will discover at least a few ways to improve your bottom-line and to capture all of the revenue that you are illegitimately entitled to.  So we will go ahead and we will get started. 

The first topic I want to address today is telephone management and it has been a source of controversy.  When the codes first came out in 1995, AMA presented them.  A lot of the physicians, especially the ones [...]