Medical Billers and Coders

HCC V28 has changed how diagnoses are mapped and weighted for risk adjustment, and those changes can affect how internal medicine practices capture patient complexity. If your coding process still relies heavily on older HCC assumptions, some eligible diagnoses may not be captured as accurately under the updated model. For internal medicine practices, the concern is not simply whether a code was removed. The bigger question is whether documentation and coding are accurately reflecting the conditions managed during each encounter and whether the practice is identifying gaps that could affect risk-score accuracy and revenue. How HCC V28 Can Affect Internal Medicine Revenue Internal medicine practices frequently manage patients with multiple chronic conditions. These conditions can be important for risk adjustment, particularly when they require ongoing evaluation, monitoring, assessment, or treatment. HCC V28 changed diagnosis groupings, hierarchies, mappings, and risk weights. As a resu...

Vaccine administration is an important source of revenue for pediatric practices, but payment problems can easily go unnoticed when hundreds of vaccine claims are processed each month. Incorrect code selection, payer underpayments, missed administration charges, and claim denials can all reduce expected reimbursement. A regular audit can help pediatric groups identify these issues, recover missed revenue, and improve their billing process. Here is a step-by-step approach to auditing pediatric vaccine administration payments. Step 1: Review the Vaccine Administration Codes Start by reviewing the administration codes reported on vaccine claims. Pediatric practices commonly use codes such as 90460 and 90471 , but these codes have different reporting requirements. The billing team should verify that the administration code matches the service actually provided and that the documentation supports the code reported. For a detailed comparison, review Vaccine Admin Codes 90460 vs. 90471 in Ped...

Global maternity billing can make OB-GYN reimbursement look simpler than it actually is. A practice may bill a global maternity package and assume that most pregnancy-related services are automatically covered under one payment. But global maternity billing has specific rules about what is included, what may be separately reportable, and what requires careful documentation. That creates an important revenue-cycle question: Is your practice capturing every service that is actually reimbursable, while correctly keeping bundled services inside the global package? The answer requires more than checking whether the global maternity claim was accepted. It requires reviewing the entire pregnancy episode, including antepartum services, delivery, postpartum care, additional procedures, high-risk services, diagnostics, payer requirements, and documentation. What Does Global Maternity Billing Actually Include? Global obstetric codes can cover a broad package of services. For example, total obstet...

Choosing a dermatology billing partner based only on a promised clean claim rate can be misleading. A billing company may tell you that it maintains a 95%, 97%, or even 99% clean claim rate. But before accepting that number, you need to know how the rate is measured, what claims are included, and whether those clean claims are actually being paid correctly . For dermatology practices, this matters because a claim can pass an initial billing check and still face problems related to medical necessity, modifiers, procedure coding, payer policies, or underpayment. A clean claim rate should therefore be viewed as one part of the revenue cycle, not the entire performance picture. What Clean Claim Rate Should a Dermatology Billing Partner Guarantee? A reasonable contract target is 97% or higher , provided the billing partner clearly defines the metric and measures it consistently at the payer level. The percentage itself, however, is only part of the agreement. A dermatology practice should a...

Home health agencies can provide the right care, submit claims on time, and still see Medicare reimbursement come in lower than expected. The reason is often not simply a billing error. Under the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM), reimbursement depends on several factors, including the patient's clinical characteristics, functional needs, comorbidities, timing of the period, and whether the period meets the requirements for a full 30-day payment. For 2026, CMS also finalized changes to PDGM case-mix weights, functional impairment levels, comorbidity adjustment subgroups, and Low-Utilization Payment Adjustment (LUPA) thresholds. CMS also finalized permanent and temporary payment adjustments for home health. That means a reimbursement drop deserves more than a quick review of the claim amount. The real question is: What changed between the care provided and the payment received? How PDGM Determines Home Health Payment PDGM uses a 30-day period of care rather than the older 60-day...

A growing denial backlog is more than a billing department problem. For a Family Practice, it can mean delayed payments, increasing A/R, more staff time spent on rework, and revenue that becomes harder to recover as claims age. But a large denial backlog does not automatically mean you should switch billing companies. The better question is: Is your current billing company actually fixing the causes of denials, or is it simply working through the same problems every month? That distinction matters. The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) recommends tracking denial rate alongside days in A/R and adjusted collection rate because these measures provide a clearer picture of revenue cycle performance. A practice can have acceptable overall A/R while still carrying a significant amount of older receivables. When Does a Denial Backlog Become a Serious Problem? Not every denial needs to be treated as a crisis. Some claims may require additional documentation, payer review, corrected c...