President's Message
By Mick Polo, CHBME, HBMA President
Our medical billing and revenue cycle management industry is evolving continually. Our companies must be adding expertise, implementing more technology, generating new ideas, and finding operational efficiencies to keep up with competition, pricing pressure, and ever growing client needs and demands.
News from around HBMA
Snapshot Survey on Data Security and Compliance; Are You Maximizing Your HBMA Membership?; New HBMA Members; CHBME Quiz Questions
The Risk of Returned Mail and How to Properly Prepare for It.
Any company engaged in healthcare that mails critical communications may run into challenges when it comes to returned mail.
Even Among the Already Large Amount of Information In the Industry, Data Is the Way Out of the Problem.
"When I first started out, you could mail out a bill and payers would cover 80-100 percent of what you billed,” says Josh Santillan, chief operations officer for Medical Billing Unlimited. “It was pretty straightforward. You didn’t have any denials....
Navigating regulations overseas.
The world we live in is being shaped by tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and Uber who are giving us access to more and more at our fingertips. Yet the healthcare industry has somehow managed to resist the digital revolution and continue to rely on inefficient paper processes.
During a period of growth, don't forget to stay ahead of data threats.
Healthcare technology for revenue cycle management services is evolving at a rapid pace, and today’s billing providers/companies leverage these advances to reach more customers, deliver faster service, and gain a competitive advantage.
Electronic health record (EHR) systems aren't as safe as you might think.
By Reed D. Gelzer, MD, MPH
The records a billing company receives as outputs from EHR systems are commonly accepted on trust. However, now that nearly everyone is using EHRs, we’re finding that they aren’t “records” at all. Insurers and law enforcement professionals are increasingly recognizing that EHRs are well-suited for records counterfeiting, with predictable (and long-anticipated) results.
Three lessons to learn from the case of the Affinity Health Plan data breach.
As if you don’t have enough to worry about, now you have to worry about your photocopier. A $1.2 million settlement with the HHS by a New York not-for-profit managed care plan, in August 2013, was the result of a failure to delete protected health information from a leased photocopier before returning it to the leasing company.
Attacks can take a well-oiled business and completely sideline it in a matter of minutes.
Ransomware has, without a doubt, been on the uptick over the last five years. We have seen it go from a nuisance in its early stages to becoming a critical disrupter of business.
Client Question
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, identifiers such as names, telephone numbers, and license plate numbers are considered PHI and should be removed in order to de-identify information.
Coding Corner
By Melody W. Mulaik, MSHS, RCC, CPC, CPC-H
The only constant is change. We have all heard this mantra for much of our lives. The speed in which we accept and embrace change varies significantly from person to person. Sometimes we get more accepting of change as we gain more experience (aka get older) and, other times, we find that is not the case.
Software Talk
By Nate Moore, CPA, MBA, FACMPE
Now that we have worked through several examples with the syntax of arrays and have seen how arrays can make spreadsheets easier, this article goes even further. The most important thing to remember as you follow the examples in this article is to enter the formulas with Ctrl+Shift+Enter to get the curly braces that surround Excel formulas.
From the Road
I realize it is getting a bit harder for medical billing companies to maintain the same profit margins today that we enjoyed just a decade ago. And where you spend your discretionary income takes more thought.
