Shakespeare’s Romeo once stated “What’s in a name?” Well, doctors, hospitals and insurers are asking the same question in their line of work…“What’s in a Code?”

 A whole lot, according to the Wall Street Journal. Currently, doctors and hospitals use the ICD-9CM billing codes, however, the new ICD-10 billing codes which are coming in October 2011 call for more details about the patients, their conditions and their treatments. (See “Look Out, Docs: Here Comes ICD-10)

For example currently, there are 5 codes for a sprained ankle; with the ICD-10 codes there will be 45 different codes, with very specific details attached to each one. The new system will have 155,000 codes including 68,000 codes describing diagnoses, up from 13,000 currently, and 87,000 codes for different medical procedures, compared with 3,000 today. Hospitals use both types of codes, but physicians use only the diagnostic codes.

“That’s very complicated to a provider,” an official at the Medical Group Management Association tells the WSJ. A rushed doc might just check “unspecified” to describe the injury.”

Apparently, the providers of our healthcare system could be in for a shock.
For doctors and insurers the battle lines are drawn. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are pushing for this new system, because they claim it can boost claims insurers return to doctors for coding errors by 10%. However, it could become a costly headache for patients and doctors − to the tune of $1.64 billion over the course of fifteen years. 

So what is better, having more specific information on each patient or having a frustrated doctor, who just puts in an unspecified code so he can get paid?  So I start where I began, “What’s in a Code?” A lot of money and a lot of reasons for doctors and insurers to keep on fighting.

Legal and court professionals throughout the country have relied on Bates Stamping to help keep track of legal documents in cases for more than 100 years. Ever since the original Bates automatic numbering machine was patented in 1891, some form of Bates numbering has been used.

Even today, Bates stamping allows attorneys and court officials to clearly refer to specific points of reference within legal documents including medical records during record review and presentation.

MediConnect Global provides customizable Bates Stamping with its medical record retrieval services that is very easy to setup and automatically applied to your downloadable medical record PDF files.

When you login to your MediConnect account, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click preferences. Scroll down to Customizable Bates/Page Stamping Preferences.

Here you have as many as 11 choices you can make on how your Bates stamp will appear and in what location on the page. A small “example” window allows you to preview how the stamp will appear on your pages.

Once you’ve selected your choices, click on submit and continue to place your medical record retrieval order. Remember to select Bates Stamping.

That’s it! When you download your medical record in PDF format, the page stamping is automatically applied to the medical record.

If you don’t like how your Bate stamp appears you can make an online change and re-download the PDF with a newly formatted stamp.

We’re interested in knowing how you utilize Bate stamping in your firm. If you would like to share your thoughts, go to the comment section and drop us a line or two.