By: Zach Simpson
As you train your staff on the changes that were recently made regarding evaluation and management coding it is very important to ensure that your staff understands the auditor’s perspective as well. There are four distinct portions of an auditor’s tool when evaluating the documentation guidelines for office/outpatient evaluation and management (E/M) services (99202-99215). The four distinct portions are diagnoses, data, risk, and calculation of medical decision making (MDM). In order to ensure that a provider’s progress note is complete in the auditor’s eyes the provider should ask themselves the following six questions to create the best chances of successfully meeting the auditors expectations:
- Does my progress note contain a medically appropriate history and examination?
- Were my diagnoses addressed appropriately?
- Did I document all orders and data reviewed?
- Were other professionals included in my documentation that I worked with?
- Was an independent historian used?
- Does the documentation support the level of risk I chose?
For the remainder of the article, I am going to dive deeper into each question above so that you, as providers are able to recognize insufficient areas in a provider’s E/M documentation when you perform a self audit to better your practice.Continue reading