Vaping has become a very hot topic recently, due to the rapid increase of patients showing up at physicians’ offices and ERs with lung injuries.  The Centers for Disease Control […]

Last month, I wrote about accurate coding for aortic valve disease. This month, we’ll look at coding for mitral valve disease. The mitral valve is located in the left side […]

The coders version of the fall equinox has arrived with 2020 ICD-10 changes taking effect as of October 1. While mother nature herself is cooling down and we all get […]

There are four valves in the heart that separate either the heart chambers from each other, or separate blood flow from heart blood flow.  They are, in the left heart, […]

Classification systems like ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS are all about trade-offs—balancing the ongoing need for new levels of detail with the increasing complexity of the classification. PCS has its own unique […]

As the activity around the forthcoming 2020 election period is heating up, and with it, talk of “Medicare-For-All” options, I thought I’d begin my contribution to the Inside Angle blog […]

For those of us facing “maturity,” when we were growing up the year 2020 seemed an impossibly exotic thing, the stuff of science fiction. Time has flown like a freaking […]

Part one of this two-part blog was a high-level summary of two major areas of focus in the proposed MS-DRG changes: the MCC/CC designations and the “unrelated OR DRGs. This […]

If there is a theme to this year’s proposed MS-DRG changes in the IPPS proposed rule, it is “ICD-10 Data.” Now that two years’ worth of ICD-10 coded MedPAR data […]

 “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness … loneliness was often in the background of clinical […]

In my last blog, I recommended checking out excerpts from the March ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance meeting. Those excerpts were written proposals for ICD-10 codes describing SDOH (social determinants of […]

While reading AAPC’s Healthcare Business Monthly, April 2019, I came across an article about problem lists by Mary Wood and Michael Warner. The authors include an example of a poorly […]