This week’s Medicare updates include recent fraudulent billing activity among certain DMEPOS suppliers, a final decision memo on coverage of transcatheter aortic valve replacements, and more!
Thyroid disorders challenge outpatient hospital coders because the record often contains symptoms, laboratory values, medications, imaging findings, and surgical history before it contains a clear final diagnosis. Those clues can help a coder understand the encounter, but they do not authorize the coder to diagnose the patient.
The prevalence of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) in U.S. hospitals declined between 2015 and 2023, according to a CDC survey recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
