Medical billing services are one of those topics that can never be discussed enough if you are related to the healthcare industry. Hence, laying down opportunities for students to adapt and see themselves in the role of a medical biller and coder is a process we all should know.
Many people are choosing this field because of higher earnings at the end of the day. And this makes medical billing and coding education a highly beneficial and suitable career in the long run, in an environment where healthcare providers are shifting to electronic health records.
You can become a certified medical reimbursement specialist by passing a medical billing certification exam that is held by American Association of Professional Coders (AAPC).
Medical Billing and Coding Education – As a Career Move
You become a certified professional biller (CPB) after taking the CPB exam, answering 200 multiple choice questions within a time limit of five hours and 40 minutes. It only takes a mix of interest and passion for a healthcare professional to go through this guide.
The certified medical billing specialist (CMBS) examination consists of a 100 multiple choice questions, and by successfully answering them, you can become an authentic medical biller. However, medical coding or just coding requires the students to follow different criteria set.
Certified medical coder (CPC) certification brings you up to speed with the coding world, and by passing it, you become a certified coder. This gives you an edge over the others without a certification when the companies are looking to hire medical coders. The CPC exam, however, has 150 multiple choice questions with reading materials available online.
Certified Medical Biller’s Salary
The certifications are not mandatory, but they help you in landing a well-paid job. According to a survey in 2012, a medical biller earned $16.42 an hour, bulking up to $34,000 a year. With added experience, the pay will increase over time. An experienced certified biller and coder can quickly earn up to $50,000 a year.
Medical billing online jobs are abundantly available since it is an emerging field. The reward is also generous with the option of being able to work from home. Many people are managing more time for their friends and family by working as a part-time or remotely.
Four-week Online Course for Medical Billing
There is a four-week online course for medical billing as well. It takes more of your ability than the actual duration to influence your medical billing career. There are many online medical billing programs you can get enrolled in and start learning. By the time medical billing and coding education ends, you’ll feel accustomed to all the complicated medical jargon.
Online Courses with Financial Aid
There are courses available for both the mediums. You can study online and appear in the exams at $129 per credit hour. Or you can attend regular classes at a university. For students living outside the US, the tuition fee jumps up to $315 per credit hour.
Federal student aid programs allow students to have loans and grants for pursuing medical billing courses. You can also look for AHIMA merit-based scholarships if you’re a student with distinction.
NeuronUP is an online platform for professionals working in neurorehabilitation and cognitive stimulation with patients with cognitive deficits related to Alzheimer’s, Parkinsons, traumatic brain injury, ADHD, normal aging, etc.
Elevator pitch
In the United States alone, there are millions of people living with Alzheimer’s,Parkinson´s, traumatic brain injury, Multiple sclerosis, and ADHD. There is an absolute necessity to help rehabilitate people with these conditions and NeuronUP can help.
Founders’ story
Iñigo Fernández de Piérola
NeuronUP was born out of the psychology clinic of our boss, CEO and founder, Iñigo Fernández de Piérola. During his work as a psychologist, he realized that a lot of his time was spent making or searching for materials to use with his patients. Much of the content he found online or elsewhere wasn’t very useful, was very expensive or was geared only towards children. Setting out to fix that problem, NeuronUP got its first spark of life.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Being an online platform, NeuronUP puts a lot of energy into SEO to try to capture relevant searches. We get a lot of word of mouth traffic from pleased clients too. Once a month for our Spanish speaking-client base, we host online chats with renowned people working in the neurosciences. NeuronUP Academy is very popular and keeps people coming back to the site. We would like to implement that for our English-speaking clients as well in the future.
Market opportunity
Our target audience are the professionals working in neuropsychology, occupational therapy and speech therapy. With the millions of people in the world with cognitive deficits related to neurodegenerative diseases, brain injuries,mental illnesses, neurodevelopmental disorders and mental disabilities, these professionals need and deserve help to save time and energy putting together their rehabilitation strategies.
Who are your competitors?
Our clients are only professionals who can direct the rehabilitation strategy based on what each individual patient needs. Other similar products like BrainHQ and Cognifit will sell to the end user and we feel like that isn’t the best strategy.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates NeuronUP?
Professionals are able to create a strategy easily for each individual patient by working with NeuronUP. Activities such as worksheets, serious games, simulators and content generators can be personalized to the patient for maximum efficacy. Content is also classified by the cognitive function being worked, which allows for rehabilitation at the clinic or at home.
Smartphones have come a long way over the years and have become far more than simple tools for making calls and sending texts. Now, your smartphone can make financial transactions, secure your home or car, and yes, monitor your health and lead you towards a healthier lifestyle.
A variety of mobile health apps currently exist for android and iOS devices, and each app brings something unique to the table. Some are entirely free, while some charge a small fee for their services. But before we look at some of the reigning health apps currently available, let’s first look into the usefulness of mobile health apps in general.
Do mobile health apps really work?
According to Domains4Less, “Gone are the days when health professionals could only see and help patients in person. And limited are the days when websites and phone calls were the only alternative to physically speaking to a patient. Health apps are the new frontier …”
The current breed of mobile health apps available serve mainly two functions, one of which is the recording or collection of your vitals which, depending on the app, may then be shared with a health care provider. Other apps function by providing you immediate access to health information like workouts and nutrition data which can help you live a healthier lifestyle. This means that with the help of an app or a combination of apps that deliver the above functions, you can stay healthy and may not actually need to see a doctor unless you are suffering from very serious symptoms.
Even though there is no empirical evidence yet of how much health apps contribute to healthy living, there is proof that such digital tools do make you take greater notice of changes in your health, such as weight increase, the need for more physical activity, or an erratic heart rate and thus gives you an opportunity to get these issues under control. If you use such apps consistently, they are bound to eventually contribute positively to your health.
Other ways specialized health apps can help include:
Monitoring blood pressure. If you suffer from high blood pressure, this type of app could be of tremendous benefit to you. Some apps in this category even offer information on lifestyle changes you can make to control your blood pressure. Such apps work by either hooking them up to a blood pressure cuff or by entering your blood pressure results manually into the app.
Monitor your physical activity. Medical science has repeatedly proven that physical activity is the key to a healthy life in every way. The apps in this category make use of sensors in your smartphone or other smart gear to track walking, running, cycling, and even climbing steps. Certain apps in this category can also recommend workout routines to help keep you more active and improve your overall health.
Monitor your diet. Apps in this category let you keep track of what you eat and drink, as well as how your diet positively or negatively impacts your health. Depending on the app, it may also help you compare and choose the foods that are best for your overall health.
Medication reminders. With these types of app, you won’t forget to take your medication ever again. This can be very useful if you’re taking various different kinds of medication at different times. Many people who accidentally skip medication doses usually find that there’s no improvement in the condition they are trying to treat.
This app is free to download but requires subsequent payments. The price is worth it, however, considering the benefits of the app. With Doctor on Demand, you can conveniently organize video visits with certified physicians who can promptly provide you important medical advice anywhere you are in the world via your phone. Doctors on the app can provide treatment via the app for cough/cold, allergies, minor infections, flu, as well as emotional health concerns. The services are also covered by insurance (depending on your health insurance provider).
By Ben Flock, chief healthcare strategist, TEKsystems.
Ben Flock
As technology advances, so does the healthcare industry, with technological breakthroughs increasing the ability of healthcare professionals to serve their patients, record and transfer patient data and more efficiently complete other tasks necessary to keep the industry moving. IT services provider TEKsystems recently released the results of a survey that polled almost 200 healthcare IT leaders (e.g., IT directors, chief information officers, IT vice presidents and IT hiring managers) in late 2017/early 2018 on a range of key issues, including technology maturity, workforce planning, critical roles and the top trends shaping healthcare IT today.
The results revealed a shifting focus from IT leaders: healthcare is behind the curve on initiatives that have the potential to shape the industry going forward, including artificial intelligence (AI).
Business demand is driving both the interests of IT leaders and the prioritization of AI in healthcare. Value-based care, regulatory mandates and the consumer push for precision/personalized care are driving the business prioritization of AI. These results indicate that while IT leaders know AI in healthcare is the future, they are currently taking a cautious approach to utilizing the technology. This is very likely rooted in security concerns, as there are federal, state and even local mandates dictating the protection and privacy of patient data.
Although cautious, healthcare organizations are actually proceeding on the AI front. As evidence, survey data shows a high percentage of healthcare organizations are in the implementation, evaluation or refining stage with respect to specific technology applications that leverage AI – digital health systems (75 percent) and telemedicine (51 percent). This pragmatic approach to AI will continue, and healthcare organizations will address this emerging industry imperative by providing IT resources, as well as enabling platform technologies and repeatable solutions capabilities in secure applications and solutions that leverage artificial intelligence.
To ensure IT employees are aware of the need to be cautious when implementing AI initiatives, organizations must ensure adequate onboarding and ongoing risk and compliance (R&C) training is provided. An annual “check the box,” activity, R&C training isn’t enough to help employees and third parties manage risk appropriately. The best strategy is to implement a risk-based approach by focusing on higher risk functional areas with direct access to consumers and/or protected health information (PHI), and creating targeted training. Simple education and awareness tactics can dramatically improve compliance when employees and third parties understand how to apply teachings to their area.
To face and handle several challenges along the way, the healthcare industry is looking towards the IT sector for the best tools and equipment. As demands for better treatment and diagnostic procedures continue to rise, it is best for healthcare organizations, especially hospitals, to upgrade their infrastructure and deliver the best results to this end.
Big data, demands for better therapeutic methods, as well as increasing management-side complexity are challenges that clinics and hospitals will have to address. Automation is nothing new in this respect, but it demands wider adaptation among healthcare organizations that struggle with outdated equipment and lackluster patient information management.
With that being said, it is imperative for these organizations to look into hospital management systems and how they can help streamline regular and complex operations.
Automation saves costs
Automation points the way to the future of healthcare technology. One thing’s for sure, there will be a high dependence on automated systems for such areas as healthcare denial management and revenue accounting. Through an effective software product, a hospital can make significant cuts to operational costs, enabling the savings to be channeled towards the development of better facilities and the procurement of advanced equipment.
Automation lightens the workload
Hospital staff have a lot of things on their plates. More often than not, they will have to handle routine tasks such as validating patient data and organizing a large bulk of information. Using intelligent solutions to everyday responsibilities enables you to lighten the workload on your staff so they can focus on more important functions.
Automation streamlines medical billing
Another high point of using effective hospital management software is that it allows an organization to make proper computations for their patients. This has always been a challenge that hospitals need to endure way back when accounting software was not as sophisticated as it is now. But with recent innovations in modern tech, it is possible for hospitals to reduce the amount of paperwork in accounting and to bill their patients without the possibility of a dispute.
Now that at least 96 percent of hospitals have implemented an electronic health record (EHR) most organizations are facing the reality that the technology has not truly helped them achieve their clinical quality and financial goals.
Electronic, enterprise-wide data is essential to manage highly complex, high-cost patients that providers care for every day. However, EHRs typically do not deliver the insight or tools providers need to manage these high-risk or the near high-risk patients when they are not in the hospital.
If the EHR does offer such population health management (PHM) capabilities, it typically requires an excessive amount of manual data access and manipulation, leading to even greater costs. That means patients who require more intensive care support at home, or who could highly benefit from timely and targeted intervention, face care delays simply due to lack of provider resources.
The Medicare Access and CHIP Re-authorization Act (MACRA) of 2015’s Merit-based Payment System (MIPS) brings this challenge into clear focus, highlighting how individual providers and healthcare organizations need automated patient interventions to efficiently deliver care throughout the continuum. Automation and more precise outreach not only helps care managers work more efficiently, but it also forges stronger engagement between providers and patients for long-term clinical quality and financial gains.
Gaps In Technology Capabilities
According to a recent survey conducted by our company of more than 800 healthcare professionals, most organizations seem to understand how crucial PHM technology is to MIPS success. Few professionals, however, are apparently taking full advantage of available opportunities to better their organization. For example, 80 percent of healthcare professionals reported they have the necessary technology for PHM or to manage MIPS performance, but only 30 percent reported they are able to automate interventions across populations.
Automating interventions is becoming a critical piece of PHM to reduce the significant resources required to analyze data and conduct outreach. Currently, a care manager can spend approximately 40 percent of their time just searching for patient data, while PCMHs require 59 percent more staff per provider to fulfill care management requirements.
Streamlining the data aggregation combined with technology that continuously analyzes data and initiates communication with the patient will eliminate the manual efforts that burden the care managers and providers assigned to PHM today. More importantly, such technology delivers consistency and predictability for patient interventions, an essential component to modify patient behavior and yield successful outcomes.
Yielding More Precise Guidance
Guidance to deliver precise and effective interventions and outreach is possible, yet very limited if confined to single-practice EHR data alone. By only utilizing a provider’s own patient data, organizations will be limited to a partial view of a designated population and the accuracy of patient care-gaps will be substantially degraded. Numerous other data sets, including EHR data captured from unaffiliated providers as well as non-clinical sources, must be included for more accurate outcome predictions and targeted interventions.
For example, by including data from community providers that co-manage patients, data from regional and national HIEs (Carequality/Commonwell), as well as other key data points concerning social determinants of health will yield much more accurate risk scoring and prioritize patients for interventions. Information such as patients’ nearby relatives, home address, and car ownership can change frequently and be incorporated into sophisticated algorithms that help predict behaviors and outcomes.
A care manager can then use those analytic capabilities to stratify these patients into risk categories for more frequent interventions that can be initiated automatically based on pre-defined rules. Patients at varying risk levels for acquiring Type-2 diabetes, for instance, may need different levels of support from the provider to help them make the healthcare and lifestyle choices to better manage their health and improve their outcomes.
According to the Office of Coordination of National Health Information, 50 percent of healthcare dollars are wasted on inefficient processes. Transformative innovation must not only change the current way things are done, it must be disruptive by having a meaningful impact on time, quality, cost and operational effectiveness – it must dramatically simplify and accelerate the process it enables.
There are very exciting ways in which digital technology is creating transformation across the entire healthcare system in areas such as connected health, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, mobile data gathering, analytics, digital therapeutics and remote patient monitoring. All of these technological developments will improve healthcare efficiency, but more importantly they will drive the delivery of individualized care and dramatically improve patient outcomes as follows:
Access to Care
Connected health, or telehealth, is enabling the delivery of care to rural areas, where access is often nonexistent or very limited. It is also being used to address growing medical staff and physician shortages by providing access to timely care through collaborative tools such as eConsults. Telehealth delivers faster, less expensive and more convenient healthcare and in doing so significantly improves patient outcomes.
Patient Engagement
Conventional patient engagement systems display information at the hospital bedside, which is only one of many relevant ways to connect with patients. Companies are now integrating artificial intelligence or ‘virtual’ health coaches into interactive educational platforms, resulting in higher utilization and engagement, and delivering more robust, actionable content.
Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM)
A vast array of innovative wearables and sensors such as the biosensor bra patch, implantable glucose sensor, electronic tattoos and the cardiac mapping vest are revolutionizing remote monitoring capabilities. These remote monitoring systems have the potential to help achieve triple aim goals by leveraging the latest advancements to collect and analyze patient data beyond the bedside. Patients and providers can use smart phones, tablets and apps to remotely assess, diagnose and monitor their patients. Electronic monitoring can be an effective solution to identifying issues as they happen while also enabling more effective tracking of patients post-discharge, improving compliance and adherence, and reducing the number of re-admissions.
Guest post by Kiran Ajaz, technical content writer, EZOfficeInventory.
The healthcare sector is increasingly bombarded with new medical equipment. It is extremely important to maintain equipment efficiency to provide quality care and cut costs. Read on to learn about the equipment concerns of the healthcare sector and how important equipment efficiency can be!
The healthcare industry, whether labs, clinics or hospitals, use a vast variety of specialized equipment, devices, and medications to serve patients better. If you don’t keep track of your equipment, it can result in your staff spending a lot of time in looking for it. This involves putting your patient’s life at stake just because medical equipment you have could not be traced at the point of need. When hospitals have to continuously deal with increased patient demands, understaffing and rising costs, effective equipment management eventually becomes vital.
Let’s take an example of stainless steel surgical instruments and equipment found in a dentist’s office and even hospitals. They cost more than $100,000 and cannot be replaced easily because of limited availability and high costs. The large amount invested is a pretty good reason to track and manage equipment.
Equipment efficiency does not only provide high-quality patient care but also saves cost. Simply put, hospitals need to give high-quality care using fewer resources at a reduced cost. It is important that while you cut the cost, the quality of care should not be compromised. Hospitals and health systems of all sizes can benefit by rethinking factors like the distribution, asset acquisition and management of medical equipment. They can improve their overall capacity, quality of care, workflow and productivity by maintaining the efficiency of their equipment.
Equipment management concerns and importance of equipment efficiency
1. The rise in the number of medical equipment
As the technology advances, it becomes more tightly integrated into patient care. This is the reason that you notice the rise of medical assets across hospitals. In the year 1995, there were 8 devices at the bedside while in the year 2010, there were 14. Such a rise in medical assets comes with additional requirements of reporting and maintaining quality care. Not just that, caregivers no longer have the time to search for equipment and need the assets to be readily available. When they are not readily available, you need to purchase the equipment which is an obvious financial expenditure. Along with that, commitment to an asset expands to maintenance, user training, and service – all of which have an impact on a hospital’s budget.
Among medical equipment, mobile assets are found in thousands and denote tens of millions in total investment. The GE Healthcare states that hospitals own 35000 inventory SKUs and the utilization rate is between 32 percent and 38 percent. This means hospitals are basically overspending billions each year particularly on mobile assets that are not utilized properly. Low utilization rate means a drop in revenue.
It should be remembered that simply cutting down inventory alone is not going to fix under-utilization because workflow has a huge role to play. Hospital managers need to optimize workflow before they try to adjust the number of assets and that can be solved using equipment tracking software. They can easily develop a replacement strategy for equipment using equipment tracking solution. After all, you can’t just decide to purchase a new telemetry monitor when a nurse tells you that she can’t find it in the storage room.
2. Hospital incidents and quality care
The hospital should be able to provide quality care to its patients. Patients should be able to get treatment and care without patient developing infections like post-operative hemorrhages, pulmonary embolisms, respiratory failure and reaction to transfusions. The CDC states that hospital infections account for an estimated 1.7 million infections and 99000 related deaths.
Equipment efficiency achieved with an online equipment management system can do wonders. Let’s take an example of preventing the spread of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease in England. When surgical instruments were properly tracked and timely sterilized using a properly maintained sterilizer, it helped the medical specialists to prevent the use of infected instruments with other patients. Preventing the spread of disease actually begins with proper equipment management.
Secondly, having the correct quantity of medical equipment and supplies when needed, helps to prevent patients from being denied any health services. You need to keep accurate and timely data on equipment or supplies when they go low and need to be re-ordered. A medical inventory software can help you do that and enhance the overall performance of employees.
Smartphones have come a long way over the years and have become far more than simple tools for making calls and sending texts. Now, your smartphone can make financial transactions, secure your home or car, and yes, monitor your health and lead you towards a healthier lifestyle.
