Admit and Discharge dates

[Ksecreto2015]

Does the patient have to be discharged before you bill their inpatient doctor visits?
If so, does anyone have the link for federal guidelines?

 

[thomas7331]

I have never heard of such a requirement. Some patients are hospitalized for a very long time, and delaying the billing of doctor's visits until discharge would pose an undue financial burden on physician practices and could even end up causing timely filing denials. Some hospitals do have billing systems with limitations that make it difficult for them to separate their professional and facility claims, in which case they may wait and bill them all together after discharge, but I've never heard that any payer that requires the physicians to hold their claims until after the patient is discharged. As long as the documentation is complete and supports the services billed, I don't know why it would be necessary.

 

[Pam Warren]

For physician services, you may bill as soon as the documentation is available to support the face to face visit. Physician charges are limited to single encounters, so there is no requirement to wait for the discharge, unless of course, you are billing for the discharge service. If the documentation exists, I recommend you get your charges out the door as soon as possible.

Facility coders must wait for patient discharge in order to be able to reveiw the entire patient record for that stay so that they can assign the appropriate DRG.

 

[dikehn]

initials for MEDICARE

If a medicare patient is admitted on the 1st and then discharged on the 9th in the afternoon and was then again readmitted on the 10th, the very next day, isnt there a medicare rule that a new initial cannot be billed if there was one within the last 30 days