September is sepsis awareness month and I want to discuss coding sepsis. First I will introduce the concept of medical coding and the definition of sepsis. Skip to half way down for specific coding sepsis examples. What is Medical Coding? Medical coding is the transformation of diagnoses and procedures into a set of universal alphanumeric […]
Infectious Disease – The Coolest Medical Specialty
I may just be biased but the coolest medical specialty out there by far is infectious disease (ID). It has been a while since I sung its praises on my path to being an infectious disease specialist here, here and here so this is a very overdue blog post. Everybody in medicine knows that the […]
A Guide to Your Annual Physical Exam
I admit I’m increasingly frustrated with people who vilify physicians out of ignorance and misinformation. Case in point. A fictional patient with hypertension has a health insurance program that allows for a “free” annual physical exam. You know, one without a co-pay or deductible cost to the patient. He makes an appointment, sees his physician, […]
ICD Codes: You Will be the Death of Me.
This is a continuation of my earlier rant on Medicare/Medicaid. …Earlier this week, it was another patient. Also with osteomyelitis (a bone infection). Doing well however. I still had this patient on antibiotics and wanted to get bloodwork to monitor for potential adverse effects of the antibiotics. Knowing that bloodwork requires an ICD-code for billing […]