Medical Combination Code- What Is It

1. Medical Combination Code: What Is It?

2. Naturally, there are plenty of different challenges that come with running a medical practice, but one of the biggest ones is definitely medical coding – especially when you’re a small practice, and every possible claim denial comes with a serious knock to your cash flow and overall ability to tend to your patients. • So, over the course of this article, we’ll be taking a look at what combination codes are as they’re a major part of medical coding – exploring things like diagnosis codes and why it’s generally really important to have a specialized medical coding and billing department to handle them.

3. Understanding Combination Codes and Diagnosis Codes • Kicking things off, let’s provide a little bit of background into what medical coding actually is. Fundamentally, this is more or less just converting medical procedures and diagnoses (whether they’re simple or slightly more complex) into a universally recognized code that’s recognized by your patient’s insurance company. • Generally speaking, there are actually quite a few different coding systems, but the main one is the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code – specifically, and the most widely used version of this, we’ll be talking about ICD-10, which the World Health Organization recommends all kinds of medical practice use.

4. The Role of Diagnosis Codes • Put simply, all of the diagnosis codes that make up the ICD system represent a different part of any given patient’s diagnosis, which is generally crucial for a few different things – not least handling insurance claims, tracking patient health status, and even just you, as a healthcare provider, are going to be properly paid for all of the services you’ve provided. • Furthermore, to go back to what we mentioned earlier, these codes are ‘universal’ – meaning they’re essentially the kind of language that’s used when healthcare professionals, insurance companies, and

5. other kinds of stakeholders in the healthcare industry are communicating with each other. • Having said all of this, there can still be situations where one single code isn’t fully sufficient when describing a patient’s condition properly, so this is where what’s known as ‘combination codes’ come into play. Combination Codes: The Essence • In essence, combination codes are a specific type of code that’s used in the ICD-10 system so that healthcare providers are able to represent two separate diagnoses within a single code.

6. Naturally, these codes end up playing a fairly big role when you need to show all the different factors influencing health status of your patients – especially when there is an associated complication or secondary process/secondary code. • This might be a little awkward to visualize, so as an example, think of one of your patients coming in and you discover something abnormal in their native coronary artery, for instance. From here, The ICD-10 would basically allow for a combination code so you’re able to show both the fact that you’ve found something abnormal as well as the particular diagnosis – ultimately leading to a much more comprehensive overview of their condition.

7. Why Outsource Your Medical Billing and Coding Services to PMN • As healthcare physician, you might be wondering if you and your physicians are able to deal with these combination codes by yourself, but it’s generally not so simple when you’re working with limited staff and resources. • So, to round off the article, let’s take a look at why it’s generally recommended that you partner with a professional medical billing and coding service like PMN instead:

8. Expertise and Efficiency Put simply, PMN has been helping small practices like yours for over 20 years, so all of your medical records are going to be in the hands of seasoned professionals with plenty of different specialties – particularly when it comes to working with the ICD-10 coding system and combination codes. • Staying Current with Coding Updates Generally speaking, the ICD-10 is a pretty dynamic system that gets updated with new codes fairly frequently, so PMN can be a great help with staying up to date with all the latest coding changes and implementing them in your practice.

9. Clinical Documentation Excellence Accurate diagnostic coding relies pretty heavily on clinical documentation, which is something the team at PMN is well-versed in – especially when it comes to aligning it with ICD-10 criteria so that the amount of errors you have are massively minimized. • Focus on Patient Care Lastly, once you delegate a good chunk of the coding and billing PMN, you and your staff are ultimately going to be able to devote a lot more time and energy to providing quality health services to all of your patients.