curative Billing - Dx Tables

Medical billing is hard sufficient with it having to be cryptic besides. Unfortunately, there is nothing more cryptic than Dx, or pathology code tables when it comes to Dme billing. In this installment, we're going to try to make some sense of Dx tables and give you some basic data that you'll need to know in order to understand how to use them when submitting a bill using your Dme software.

Dx tables, or pathology code tables, are tables of data that pertains to a pathology of a patient's illness. This has nothing to do with the type of tool they are getting or their assurance or whatever else. It is simply a designation of what it is that the inpatient is suffering from. Now, this might sound pretty basic, but the problem is that there are more pathology codes than New York City has people. As a matter of fact, pathology code tables are so heavy that updating them ordinarily is a big business in the curative billing industry. But that's a topic for someone else article. The table is assuredly very small. It contains just two items. The first is the actual code itself. The second item is the report that goes with the code. These can be listed in the table in one of two ways depending on how your software works. The codes can either be listed in alphanumeric order by the actual code estimate or they can be listed in alphabetical order by the name of the disease or condition. Some software allows you to index your table either way. Why? Because some curative billing personnel prefer to look up the Dx codes by the name of the illness. The reasons are obvious. Who wants to memorize all those codes, though some people assuredly do just that. Boggles the mind. In your Dme software, there will be a box on your line item where you can enter what is called a pointer to your Dx code. The Dx code itself is stored in the patient's history file. This file contains all the data about the inpatient along with what is clinically wrong with the patient. You can have as many as four pathology codes for a inpatient in most software and in some cases can have as many as eight. If you think it's not potential for a inpatient to have that many problems, it is. A typical cancer inpatient in industrialized stages can have a cancer Dx code, one for poor respiration, if the cancer is of the lungs and a estimate of other ailments. When the actual bill is sent, the software cross-references the Dx pointer to the actual Dx code in the patient's file and transmits the code to the carrier, Not the pointer. It is important that you understand this. Many billers who do not understand this try to take out the pointer from the line item and manually enter in the code. This will consequent in nothing being sent to the carrier. Dx tables ordinarily work by themselves as part of the software functions. So if you simply just leave well sufficient alone, you should have no problems getting your claims straight through to the assurance carrier and paid.