ASC Coding, Billing & Collections

National medical debt bill collector Accretive Health was fined $2.5 million by the state of Minnesota, according to the Brainerd Dispatch.

Health insurance companies — including the state's largest provider, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee — mailed nearly $50 million in rebates to almost 500,000 individual policy holders in compliance with the Affordable Care Act, according to the Times Free Press.

By analyzing its coding and billing cycles, Memorial Medical Center in Port Lavaca, Texas, realized a revenue increase of $50,000 in one month, according to Healthcare Finance News.

A recently opened Baltimore command center will house federal government-hired employees attempting to crack down on suspicious healthcare filings, including for Medicare and Medicaid payments, according to an Associated Press report.

Downer's Grove, Ill.-based debt collector Optimum Outcomes announced it will acquire Patient Financial Solutions and Absolute Collection Service, businesses that work with account resolution and revenue cycle management, according to insideARM.com.

Here are the top 21 claim adjustment codes, followed by reason codes, reflecting why a claim wasn't paid or was paid differently than billed.

CMS is encouraging all ASCs and hospitals to begin prepping for the ICD-10 transition, though the final implementation deadline is expected to be in late 2014.

Iowa taxpayers saved nearly $30 million this year through a program aimed at catching Medicaid errors, according to Healthcare Finance News.

Jason Hwang, MD, co-founder and executive director of health care at the nonprofit think tank Innosight Institute and co-author of The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care with Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, discusses bundled payments and…

The Medicare Payment Advisory Committee has released data that provides an overview of Medicare spending, including the recent trend of slowed growth in the number of ASCs, which continued in 2011, according to an ASCA report.