This month, many cities across the U.S. will walk in support of mental health to help raise awareness. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), there is a […]

During the first 12 months of ICD-10, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was lenient with ICD-10 coding specificity to allow providers to become accustomed to the new […]

At the March C&M meeting, we heard the heartening report that people no longer get all in a dither about the number of ICD-10 codes. That is super good news. […]

Like most of you who participated in the ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee held last week at CMS headquarters in Baltimore, I watched the live webcast on YouTube. I also […]

After my previous blog “Myocardial infarction coding is good for the heart,” one of our readers had a good question: When is a myocardial infarction considered old? I wanted to […]

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find reading documentation for Myocardial Infarctions (MI) and coding from Chapter 9 in the ICD-10 codebook to be stressful and sometimes anxiety […]

The Official ICD Coding Guidelines state that a condition must be present at the time of the encounter, affect patient care or management and be clearly documented in order to […]

Let’s say there’s this not-so-young-anymore woman who was frustrated by a long bout of a winter cold/flu. Upon recovery, she is asked by some friends if she wants to go […]

Note: I started this blog on Monday morning, when an agreement to end the shutdown was still being worked out. Now that government is funded, the blog looks like old […]

We all know change in the healthcare field is a necessity for growth and improvement, but is change always a good thing? I’m constantly amazed at how far we’ve come […]

Donna: Sue, do you remember when we started our blog back in 2012? Didn’t the idea present itself at a conference we were attending? Sue: Yes, it did! We were […]

The ball dropped, we tossed out our old calendars, and many of us made the traditional promises to ourselves in the New Year. Whether it’s trimming off those few extra […]