Why Accuracy Matters in Medical Coding

Coding inaccuracies lead to claim delays and denials, and compromised patient care. Some serious consequences include legal actions, lawsuits, penalties, hefty fines, and even imprisonment.

Let’s have a look at what medical coding is and why accuracy in it is important to the upkeep of hospitals and other medical offices.

What is Medical Coding?

Medical coding is a process of transforming important information related to the collection of payment from insurance providers, including healthcare diagnosis, procedures, treatments, medical services, medications, and equipment, into numeric or alphanumeric codes.

This information is taken from different sources like the transcription of practitioner’s notes, medical record documentation, electronic records, laboratory, and radiologic results, urinalysis, pathology as well as radiologic assessments etc.

All the standardized codes need to accurately correspond to each aspect of medical billing for accurate claim reimbursement.

Why Must Medical Coding Be Accurate?

Here are some of the important reasons why medical coding is important to be optimally accurate and compliant with current laws, regulations, and medical codes.

Ensures Accurate Reimbursement

Since healthcare providers are paid by insurance carriers for their services on the basis of standardized codes assigned to a patient’s diagnoses, treatment, and equipment, the claims should be coded with the highest degree of accuracy to accelerate the reimbursement process.

Accuracy in medical coding is immensely important to ensure that the claims are submitted accurately and practices are reimbursed timely and accurately.

Error-free and claims ensure quick reimbursement and reduce the likelihood of accounts receivable.

Coding inaccuracies can lead to erratic medical billing, which may not cause claim delays and denial, which, needless to mention, may result in delayed payments coming into your practice and adversely affect its financial health.

Ensures Safety of Patient’s Health

Accurate coding helps to prove the necessity of the treatment rendered to a patient. It helps the insurance providers determine what services was provided to a patient and what resources were used in the patient care.

The patient himself or the patient’s family may require access to this information at any time. Therefore, it is immensely important that it is absolutely accurate.

Inaccurate patient information can not only affect the quality and accuracy of current and future patient care but also prove detrimental to the health of the healthcare facility.

Helps Practices Forecast the Future

Compliance with coding protocols not only helps the medical practices ensure that the billing to the patients and insurance providers is accurate and but also helps them forecast the future.

Accurate billing helps the healthcare providers to analyze correct information on revenue, costs, claim denials, and enable them to and prepare themselves for any financial challenges in the future.

Proper billing also helps practices make an informed decision about other aspects of their business like staff recruitment and patient outreach.

Final Words:

No matter what the size and specialty of medical practice, coding is important on different levels to receive on-time payment and create a record of patient care history. Without accurate coding, the information could be extremely difficult to compile.

Coding can help healthcare providers track patient information in a simplified way.

It is important to make sure that each piece of your claim is optimally accurate for a smooth and seamless reimbursement.

In the nutshell, the success of a healthcare practice depends largely on accurate and timely coding and billing processes.

How to Achieve High Coding Accuracy at Your Practice?

Today’s medical coding and documentation have become more complex than ever and medical practices are in great need of handing over their medical billing to qualified coders who have knowledge and expertise to expertly handle coding procedures and understand various regulations of both public and private medical insurance plan policies.

To streamline their billing processes and catch up the sheer volume of coding required, many healthcare providers are outsourcing their medical billing and coding to third parties to achieve greater accuracy and compliance in their processes.

Outsourcing billing processes to a medical coding service also helps providers avoid the risks of non-compliance with billing and coding rules and regulations and therefore prevent costly consequences.

A medical coding services provider helps the healthcare providers improve their efficiency and compliance, by increasing their revenue, accelerating claim reimbursement and decreasing the number of denied claims, allowing the practitioners and their team to focus on the core aspects of patient care.

Make sure that the healthcare provider you choose to provide you with a gamut of coding services with a focused approach, customized to specialty and subspecialty and are tailored to optimize your revenue cycle.

If you already have an in-house billing team in your practice, you will need to make sure that it keeps up with evolving laws, regulations, and code to ensure optimum accuracy and compliance in your medical processes.

USA Medical Coding Experts

Precision7 Inc. is full-service medical billing and coding company helping practices across the United States for more than a decade. We specialize in all aspects of revenue cycle management, including claim follow-up, claim denial resolution, payment posting, appeal submission, bill adjustments, and collection management.

We have a team of AAPC-certified medical coders who have been extensively trained to code for ICD-10, CPT, HCPCS, and HEDIS. We ensure that our staff stay on top of the constantly changing regulatory environment and implement necessary changes on time to maintain compliance with current medical rules.

We assure highly-accurate and timely medical coding solutions to maximize your efficiency and accuracy and reduce denials and rejected claims.

Working with a professional billing company like us gives you peace of mind and reassurance that your medical coding is done to the highest quality standards and will boost your cash flow and revenue stream.

How depression can ruin your life

Depression is a disorder that affects you personally and everything you do daily in life. When it sets in, recovery is not easy. Depression brings you to a low state of mind that takes time before normalcy sets in again.

One can indirectly compare depression with sadness. If you are sad, everything around you looks uninteresting. You don’t find joy in living again. The same applies to depression. It is a state of mind that can affect the body because your mind and body are interconnected and dependent on one another.

When your mind is not right, your mood changes which affects your mental capabilities. Being a chain reaction, your low mental capabilities invariably affect your physical health. The by-product of depression’s effect on physical health is a gradual process. One might not even notice any changes in one’s life at the beginning.

Are You Depressed?

How do you know if you’re depressed? Some confuse being sad with depression. Sadness is a bit similar, but it is a short-term condition. One can easily get rid of sadness and be happy within a short time. But depression is directly the opposite. If the feeling lingers for more than two weeks, you likely have depression. Some other symptoms include:

Being sad or having an empty feeling for two weeks or more.
The act of feeling hopeless or helpless.
Lack of interest in things generally.
Experiencing changes in appetite.
Experiencing occasional nausea, headaches, chronic pain.
Experiencing changes in sleeping schedule.
Isolation from friends and family.
Concentration becoming difficult.
Always anxious, and complaining of been stressed.
Frequent irritability or anger.
Looks constantly fatigued.
Thinking of committing suicide.
We have a book that can get you out of depression. Read it.

It is normal to see People with depression have trouble maintaining a normal work schedule. They might even find it difficult to fulfill any social obligation given to them. This might be due to the inability to concentrate which affects your memory. You can’t be organized when you’re in a state of depression, and making decisions becomes difficult.

Some people take temporary solace in alcohol or drugs, while others in food. Some gain weight when they are depressed, while others lose weight. All these might increase the instances of reckless or abusive behavior if not tackled in time. As nobody wants to be sad, so nobody wants to be depressed. During the state of depression, we lose a lot in any area you can think of. That is the reason why it is good to seek help any time one is going through it.

How Does Depression Affect You?
What you do daily complies with what you do over-time. If depression can affect you daily, it will affect you as long as you’re still depressed. If you’re a business person, it affects your financial level. It does not limit its disadvantages on how you sleep, eat, your education, career, your relationships, health, and concentration. It can also lead you to alcoholism or drug addiction.

Here are ways depression can affect us and ruin our life:

Digestive System: Digestive system helps our body in the area of food digestion, and assimilation of the digested food nutrients into our bloodstream. When depression sets in, it negatively affects our appetite. Some people tend to overeat, while others have a low appetite.

Those that overeat might likely develop obesity because of weight gain. It can even lead to hyperglycemia if the appetizing food is not a balanced diet. Hyperglycemia is a high blood sugar level in the bloodstream. And if it is not controlled, it can lead to diabetics.

Depression symptoms of low appetite might result in either malnutrition or hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia is a condition where you have a low sugar level in the body. It is also possible to experience stomach aches, cramps, and constipation when you’re depressed.

Cardiovascular/Immune System: Depression is a condition that prompts mental stress. Mental stress affects the brain and causes stress hormones to be released. This stress hormone narrows the blood vessel, thereby restricting blood flow. Since blood is the transport system of the body, and there is a restriction to its function, other parts of the body will be affected.

This restriction of functionality caused by the stress hormone can be damaging to your cardiovascular system and can lead to heart disease. Blood pressure tends to become high with increased pulse rate.

Over-reaction of these stress hormones for a long time can also result in a weakened immune system. The immune system helps the body to fight any strange body. If it’s low, then opportunistic infection sets in.

Sleep Disorders: Depression most times leads to sleep disorders. Your sleeping pattern is impaired. You might experience difficulty in falling asleep, and sometimes, difficulty in staying asleep. This condition is called insomnia. Insomnia and depression are interrelated, and insomnia is very common among depressed patients. Not refreshing sleep is also common with depressed people.

Memory Loss: Memory loss in a depressed person can be due to the stress hormone that is released into the system during this state. It constricts the flow of blood in blood vessels. The circulation of blood is impaired. Less blood reaches the brain through the capillaries. This is a chain reaction that results in temporary memory loss and is linked closely to your emotional and mental state. When your body is in a state of stress or anxiety or being depressed, it will be difficult to maintain focus or think clearly.

Seeking Care

The first step in seeking care is to talk to your primary healthcare provider. Your doctor is trained and equipped to help you determine the best care you need to come back to living happy, healthy life again.

What CBD Strain is Best for Anxiety?

No one enjoys those racing thoughts or racing heart. But the dynamics of our modern world predispose many of us to such an existence. Anxiety can be a mild nuisance for some of us, while for others it can be truly crippling.

Where pharmaceutical medications can help relieve anxiety levels, they often come with a variety of side effects and can even become addictive in some instances. CBD works in a different way than modern pharmaceuticals and, for the most part, is relatively free from harmful side effects.

The Research on CBD and Anxiety
There are several clinical studies involving the use of CBD to treat anxiety. Science has widely come to accept that there are indeed benefits and that they come at a relatively low cost in terms of side effects and addictive potential.

One well-respected study was carried out on Japanese schoolchildren exhibiting symptoms of social anxiety. After administering the children either 300 mg of CBD oil or a placebo every day for four weeks, researchers found subjects reported that their anxiety had declined to levels comparable to those associated with treatment with pharmaceuticals.

Another study carried out at a mental health clinic found that outpatients given 25 mg of CBD on a daily basis reported profound decreases in anxiety levels. After two months of treatment, 78 percent of those patients reported improvements with using CBD in addition to their regular treatment.

Can CBD Ever Increase Anxiety?
While most patients and the majority of studies report positive benefits from CBD in the treatment of anxiety, this is not always the case. A 2018 study found that CBD can sometimes worsen anxiety in certain cases. Interestingly, the study highlighted that patients who had a predisposition to paranoia often exacerbated their anxiety symptoms with CBD.

The Top 9 CBD Strains for Treating Anxiety
If you’d like to buy CBD flower online in Canada, and tone down those anxiety symptoms, then here are our top nine strains of high CBD strains.

1) Cannatonic
Cannatonic is a well-respected, high-CBD strain and is a reliable performer for many patients who suffer from anxiety. Cannatonic is a cross between G13 Haze and MK Ultra. CBD levels come in at 10 percent, and the strain has low THC levels of around five percent. Known for its mellow and uplifting effects, Cannatonic is also useful in treating other conditions like muscle spasms, migraines, and general pain in addition to anxiety. In addition to its potent medicinal benefits, it’s also pleasing to the palette with a sweet, earthy flavour accompanied by woody undertones.

2) Dance World
CBD levels in Dance World average11 percent, and this fragrant strain comes with hints of citrus and lavender with an herbal undertone. Many consumers find that Dance World successfully targets an anxious mind and can help lower stress due to the indica qualities of the Afghani genetics common to the strain.

3) Pennywise
With a 1:1 CBD to THC ratio, Pennywise has an average of 7.5 percent CBD. It’s a cross between Jack the Ripper and Harlequin and is extremely helpful to many patients using it to treat anxiety and stress. The balanced levels of THC and CBD help ensure that the psychoactive effects of the THC are kept in check with moderate levels of CBD, to help ensure a stable and relaxed vibe that doesn’t overwhelm or exacerbate symptoms.

4) ACDC
ACDC is one of the best-known CBD strains out there. THC levels are negligible, while CBD levels come in at 11 to 15 percent. It’s this high ratio of CBD to THC that makes ACDC extremely proficient at targeting conditions like anxiety. And what’s more, the absence of THC means that those who don’t respond favourably to it can avoid exacerbating any anxiety symptoms.

5) Stephen Hawking Kush
CBD levels come in at a bit over 10 percent with Stephen Hawking Kush. And with a 2:1 CBD to THC ratio, it means maximum medicinal benefits without aggravating symptoms with high quantities of THC. In addition to helping treat anxiety, Stephen Hawking Kush is also widely used in the medicinal community for suppressing nausea and treating depression.

6) CBD Mango Haze
CBD Mango Haze offers CBD levels of seven percent and THC levels of four percent. Known to provide relief for a variety of conditions, including anxiety, CBD Mango Haze is perhaps best known for inducing a relaxed and focussed mindset that often appeals to those who consume cannabis while at work or in other places where they must remain alert and unintoxicated. If you suffer from anxiety in the workplace and want to buy CBD flower online in Canada, this strain may be well worth checking out.

7) CBD Critical Mass
With CBD levels of 9.5 percent and THC content of 6.5 percent, CBD Critical Mass induces a relaxed and euphoric vibe in many patients suffering from crippling anxiety. And what’s more, with its sweet and earthy flavours and spicy herbal undertone, it’s pleasing to the palate.

8) Charlotte’s Web
Charlotte’s Web may be one of the most famous high-CBD strains around. The strain garnered much attention some years back when it reduced the number of epileptic seizures in a girl named Charlotte Figi, from 300 a week to one or two per month. And while many use it to control epileptic seizures, the high CBD content of 11 to 13 percent with negligible amounts of THC means that Charlotte’s Web is also extremely helpful at alleviating stress and anxiety in many consumers.

Looking To Buy CBD Flower Online in Canada
Some may claim that it’s purely snake oil, but the scientific and anecdotal evidence suggests that CBD can be extremely helpful in the treatment of anxiety. If you’re considering buying CBD flower online in Canada, there are a host of options available. While there are countless strains that all exhibit a range of effects, there are also CBD edibles, tinctures and vapes that can also function just as well and may even be preferable in certain instances.

What Is So Special About Organic Towels? Top 5 Organic Cotton Towels For You!

This topic is for those who believe in using products that are environmental friendly and buy products, keeping this thing in mind.

Today we will discuss some of the best organic towels that are great for your skin and environment as well. If you are someone who makes choices based on your overall health, and you will surely like the idea of organic towels.

And now it’s time to understand that what is so special about these organic towels, and what is so different about these towels than the other towels.

In today’s world, there are so many options available to buy whatever product you want, but there are not many that are considered to be eco-friendly.

This is also because even the consumer who is buying the product is not questioning anything. It is high time to question the packaging of the product and how the product is made and what are the ingredients used to make a product. Is there any reasonable eco-friendly substitute to use harmful products?

Let’s start with some points to keep in mind before buying a towel.

It is better to choose a size 13” x 13” if you want to buy a towel just for your face.
It is better to choose a size of 16” x 30” if you want to buy a towel for kitchen and washroom purpose.
It is better to choose a size of 27” x 52” and 35” x 60” if you want to buy a towel for bathing purpose.

Also, you prefer a light towel it is better to go for bath sheets instead of bath towel, also bath sheets are easier to wrap around your body.

It is best to use clothes that are good for your skin, especially cotton-based clothes are good for our skin and help our skin to breathe. Even it is advisable to wear cotton clothes during summer and even while sleeping. Also, there are some benefits of sleeping on organic sheets, these organic sheets are really comfortable and surprisingly really durable.

What About The Weight of a Towel?

The weight of a towel depends upon the density rating in grams per square meter (GSM). You can buy a towel from 300 to 900 GSM rating but, you should also know the difference behind this rating.

If you want to buy a towel for regular bathing purpose, it is better to choose a towel with a rating of 400 to 600 GSM. This type of towel has medium weight and such towels are good for regular bathing purpose.

On the other side, if you want to buy a towel for exercise and kitchen purpose, it is better to buy a towel with a rating of 300 to 400 GSM. These types of towels are lightweight and are more suitable for exercise and kitchen purpose.

Then, come towel with a rating of 600 to 900 GSM these type of towel are considered as luxury towels that you mainly find in big seven stars hotels.

These towels are thick, dense, and very absorbent. The problem is that such towels take more time to get dry. If you really need such a dense towel for everyday purpose, you may need to use a machine dryer for the everyday purpose not in summer but definitely in winters.

Here are Some Organic Towel Options:

It is best to choose a cotton towel for everyday purpose, they are lightweight and above all such towels are moderately absorbent and soft for your skin.
In case, you need a towel with more soft edges and durability it is better to choose Turkish cotton.
Turkish towels are denser and more absorbent. Also, Turkish towels are good at locking moisture and warmth. You must have seen such towels in hotels and spas.
Also, you will notice that the Turkish towel becomes even more soft and fluffy after washing.
Then, comes the “Zero twist” cotton towel. These towels are expensive than the usual cotton towel. These towels are cotton-based, soft, fluffy, and lighter than the other cotton towels. If you travel a lot, you can choose such towels.

What are Ringspun Cotton and Combed Cotton?

These towels are made with strong and long threads to make the towel more durable. Also, these towels do not form pills.
Then, comes ringspun cotton towels these towels have a soft texture and are made of long-short fibers.

Select The Right Colour For Your Towel:

If you want to buy some towel sets for your kitchen, you can choose a pattern and colors that are similar and compliments each other.
If you are confused, which color will suit your washroom, then it is best to go with white color because the white color goes with all sorts of colors.
It is best to always wash whatever cloth you buy from outside and then use that cloth. Also, if you want to wash your towel, do not use fabric softeners because these fabric softeners can make your towels hard and stiff with time.