I've written over 1,400 articles on this blog over the course of more than 14 years; next month it'll be 15 years. Over the years, I've written in a lot of different categories, but over a third of the articles have been on leadership. My next highest concerns diversity; I'm always interested in talking about that.


However, over all the years I've been self employed, I've overwhelmingly generated most of my income from health care. You'd think I'd have talked about it here more often, but not counting this one I've only had 101 articles on that topic on the blog. On my actual website, where I have articles, they're overwhelmingly about health care finance, aka revenue cycle consulting. In reality, I've written more articles about health care, but I've put them elsewhere over the last almost 5 years.

That's the problem with having too many agendas, especially if they're related. The other articles I wrote that might have been appropriate here went on my medical billing website's blog, which had intentions of helping patients with their billing issues. That it turned out to be more interesting to people in the industry never occurred to me, and it definitely took business traffic away from this site.

I've decided to shut the other site down as of the beginning of the year. Many of the articles that were over there will be coming here. In the early part of this year, the majority will be health care related. I'm never giving up leadership or diversity, but I need to catch up on the money maker. 🙂

What I noticed overall were the questions about CPT-4 codes and how to use them. That's not surprising; the average time for hospitals to get charge master reviews is once every 3 to 5 years. That's a horrible ration because many new codes show up every year, others leave, and a lot more are modified. For instance, in 2020 there are 146 new codes, 75 revised codes and 68 deleted codes; in previous years there's been as many as 500 overall changes to codes.

There are also 72 resequenced CPT-4 codes; that means codes that existed have received new numbers and the remaining numbers mean something else (as an example, radiology codes 78429-78434 are original codes with new definitions, while the previous definitions have been merged and moved to 78459, 78491 and 78492). This means if you had a charge master review in 2019 and don't have another one until 2022, and don't have anyone in charge of checking codes on a yearly basis, you're going to be charging for the incorrect codes for 3 years, and putting your facility on the hook for accusations of fraudulent billing.

The other common questions I've received involve revenue codes, which are usually tied into CPT-4 codes. They're usually along the line of "which revenue code should a particular CPT-4 code be billed under?" Half the time it's tied into receiving better reimbursement; half the time of the original half I'm telling them if they're doing it only for better reimbursement they're courting trouble.

The major issue is that I've been answering questions on a different website and blog that should have been addressed here. I was competing against myself and potentially losing the opportunity to generating more business; talk about stupidity!

The first sentence on my website says that I run a health care revenue cycle and management consulting company. In the first paragraph I talk about charge master and charge capture projects; it's not until the 2nd paragraph I talk about leadership. Truth be told, there's a lot of people who talk and write about leadership; there's few who write about what I do... even fewer that actually understand it.

From this point on, 2020, I'll have a better mix of topics as I move forward. That it's taken 15 years for this financial epiphany to show itself is almost embarrassing. Still, every day of every year is about learning something about one's life, career or business. It's all about progress, isn't it?

If you were a fan of the Medical Billing Answers blog, welcome. If you're new to some of the articles I'll post here that were there, enjoy. Let's the year begin! 😉