Health Tips for a Better Life

When coding for spirometry testing, it is necessary for you to know the difference between the more common coding options. You should always ask that one important question that can turn your selection process into a success: ‘Which of the spirometry codes do I need to include in my claim, and which of them should I get rid of?”

Here’s a scenario: An established patient presents to the office for a follow-up visit experiencing mild dyspnea where she was given a nebulizer or inhaler treatment. The pulmonolist also evaluates the patient’s respiratory status at that visit to determine the cause for dyspnea.

Do not leave out the possibility of reporting 94664. Sometimes patients who use inhalers on a regular basis need to learn how to use the device properly. If the staff ran a demon on how to use it the right way, you have the option to report 94664.

Here’s an example: A pulmonolist implements a care plan for a patient with asthma using Advair Diskus, an ‘aerosol generator’.

After this, a nurse shows the patient how to use the device:

You should report 99201-99215 for the office visit and 94664 — minus a modifier.

Modifier 25 is not important when reporting 94664 with an office visit as CMS indicates that this modifier applies only to E/M services carried out with procedures that carry a global fee. CPT code 94664 doesn’t have a global fee.

Safety measure: Since some payers would still/ need appending modifier 25 to an E/M when carried out with 94664, it is important that you check with insurers about their policy. The medical staff may administer a medication dose to a patient during the teaching session. In this instance, you should report the most comprehensive service. When dose is administered as part of a demonstration, its intent without a doubt is to teach the patient. Therefore, reporting 94664 is more apt. When the intent is to deliver a medication dose to someone who’s having trouble breathing, go for 94640 instead.

For further information on this, sign up for a medical coding guide like Supercoder.

One of the Fastest Growing Professions

There are myriad reasons for you to focus your efforts towards building a career as a medical assistant! Although the medical assistant profession can be very challenging, involving a lot of dedication and responsibility, it also brings many financial and personal satisfactions. Undoubtedly, medical assistants have always been considered to be major components of the healthcare industry, fulfilling a set of vital roles in the medical offices. As a medical assistant, you have the opportunity to offer a very important service to the community, by participating actively in the ongoing process of patients’ care and by channeling your efforts towards improving the patients’ health.

Unlike other professions in the medical field, the medical assistant profession involves a lot of interaction and communication, both with the monitored patients and with other members of the medical staff. Thus, besides being the main healthcare provider for patients, as a medical assistant you also have the opportunity to offer patients a lot of moral support. Due to its eclectic nature and the pronounced level of interaction with people, the medical assistant profession is considered to be a very demanding profession, requiring a wide range of practical and theoretical skills, good decision making abilities, good communication skills and nevertheless, a lot of talent!

Although a career as a medical assistant can be very challenging, it also brings a lot of satisfaction! Apart from the noble and altruistic nature of the profession which allows practitioners to offer an important service to the community, ensuring the well-being of patients, the medical assistant profession is also very lucrative and financially stable. While an inexperienced medical assistant may at first earn an annual $20,000 salary, fully qualified medical assistants may eventually earn more than $40, 000 a year.

Due to the ongoing development and expansion of the healthcare industry, the request for medical assistants is very acute in present and it is expected to further grow in the coming years, thus rendering the medical assistant career stable and secure on professional level. In addition, well-trained medical assistants have very good prospects for promotion in the medical field, being able to qualify for various administrative occupations or become medical technology professionals.

In order to fulfill your dream of becoming a qualified medical assistant, it is very important not to neglect your professional training. Keep in mind that proper medical assistant training is crucial for becoming certified and acquiring important credentials in a short period of time. At first, medical assistant training focuses on familiarizing you with the basics, later helping you to further expand your knowledge and overall practical skills required.

The best thing to do in order to ensure a secure career in the field is to attend a high quality medical assistant training program at a highly recognized medical assistant school. By attending to a good medical assistant school, you will be able to polish your skills as a medical assistant and become a true professional in your branch. The medical assistant training you will receive in a highly recognized medical assistant school will greatly increase your chances of obtaining your desired certifications and accreditations from the first try, allowing you to build the scaffolds of a promising career in no time!

There are various medical assistant schools out there, each of them offering different advantages and disadvantages. The trick to finding the most appropriate medical assistant school for you is to carefully decide upon the level of professional medical assistant training you wish to achieve and to analyze the resources you benefit from; you should know exactly how much time, money and effort you are willing to invest in your medical assistant training long before you start attending to the courses of a certain medical assistant school. For instance, although they may offer similar credentials, some medical assistant schools have the advantage of allowing students to graduate sooner than others.

In order to find out exactly what to expect from a certain kind of medical assistant training offered by a given medical assistant school, it is very important to do a little research before choosing the most appropriate educational program for you. After you have decided upon a medical assistant training program, you should maintain your motivation levels high and work hard to achieve your pre-established goals. While some training programs may be better than others, and some medical assistant schools may be more popular than others, in the end the success of your medical assistant career is direct proportional with your motivation, dedication and not to mention, talent!

There is a new group gathering political support for a say in the way the Drug Enforcement Administration runs the “war on drugs”. Although there is no doubt of the need for firm action to reduce the availability of addictive drugs on the streets, the latest DEA crackdown does little more than penalize large numbers of ordinary people in pain. This April sees a Senate panel taking evidence from the owners and operators of nursing homes, doctors, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists. There is great concern at the new rules requiring pharmacies to wait for a prescription signed by a licensed doctor before dispensing the more powerful of painkillers. In hospitals and nursing homes, the standard practice used to allow nursing staff to place orders for drugs orally, with the prescriptions being written up later. This smoothed the treatment regime, ensuring a continuous supply of medication without any delays caused by missing paperwork. That practice is now prohibited in nursing homes. Why should this matter? The answer lies in the numbers. Nationally, there are about 16,000 nursing homes and they are literally “home” for some two million patients. An average of about 60% of these people have problems with chronic pain. They are vulnerable. Many are old or confined to bed. They cannot fend for themselves by going to see a doctor and getting a prescription filled by a pharmacy. They depend on the medical staff to supply the drugs they need to manage the pain. In fact, many are left for days in acute pain without relief because the paperwork in the hands of the pharmacy does not match DEA requirements.

In fact, the DEA has stepped up enforcement with recent prosecutions in Ohio, Michigan, Virginia and Wisconsin. This action is justified in two ways. First, there is a need to prevent the diversion of drugs from hospitals, clinics and nursing homes. If drugs are dispensed without paperwork, hospital staff could sell them on for street distribution. Secondly, some powerful meds are used by lazy nursing staff to dope any patient thought disruptive. This abuse of the vulnerable is made less likely if all dispensing is supervised by the attending physicians. But strict enforcement ignores the reality of life in nursing homes. Unlike hospitals, there are fewer doctors around and more day-to-day responsibility falls on the nursing practitioners. If nurses cannot be considered the agent of the supervising doctors, there can be serious delays in getting any prescription signed.

All systems are set up with checks and balances. In this case, there are real problems to be addressed on both sides and it will be interesting to see where the Senate panel draws the line. If we were talking only about the less addictive painkillers like tramadol apap, there would be less cause to worry. Drugs which are not habit-forming should be made available with the minimum of formality within the nursing home environment. This gives relief for the majority of people. Where you can’t control the pain by the fact that you buy tramadol‘s limits, doctors should be more closely monitoring their patients’ health. The balance of benefits and costs in the use of the more powerful drugs changes as people age and their health deteriorates. It might be reasonable to use the opiates for a person dying of cancer. Here, you want the maximum pain relief to make the person’s last days more comfortable. In other cases, the use of stronger drugs should be careful monitored.