Playing the Game

Last week we put up our “About Us” page and a beginning page for “Outcome Assessments.” This last page is, and will be for a while, a page in progress as we try to get direct links to  each of the assessments and potentially add our thoughts about each. We just posted our “HIPAA” page and expect its usefulness to grow as well. Right now we are trying to get the skeleton up and we’ll put flesh on the bones as we go along. Please let us know what you think, and if you have any helpful materials, please send them our way. We will give full credit, of course. I ended up sneaking another page up, “Fee Schedules.” Hope it is helpful…

Week after week, patient’s present to our office with their Aetna ID card.  We call to check for acupuncture benefits and are told, time and time again, that they HAVE coverage.  The patient has already done their own research and knows that they are supposed to have coverage.  Yet, with the first billing, the denial comes.  Now, as it turns out, when verifying insurance, the burden is on us to ask each and every pointed question since the person on the other end providing the benefit information is typically clueless and in a foreign country where English is, at best, a second language.

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As we are getting htis website up and running, our first order of business is to get on the website the things we promised we would in our book, Playing the Game, A Step-by-Step Guide to Accepting Insurance as an Acupuncturist. So to give a heads up of what is coming in the next few weeks before our book hits the market, here is what we are planning on having up here on our website:

• Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) information
• Outcome assessments
• Sample fee schedules
• Medical Provider Network (MPN) finder
• Commonly used Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes for acupuncturists
• Forms, procedures, policies from the book
• CMS-1500 item 24b location list
• Insurance company information
• State-by-state information for workers comp, eventually

Our ultimate goal is provide the one stop for information for all acupuncturists billing insurance.

This is the companion website for our new book coming out in the second quarter of 2011: Playing the Game: A Step-by-step Guide to Accepting Insurance as an Acupuncturist. This website should be thought of as as an addition to the book where we can keep up-to-date and additional information and create a community to help each other with insurance billing. The authors, Tiffany Anderson and Dr. Greg Sperber, would love to see the site grow into a hub for acupuncturists. Please send us your questions and we will post answers for everyone. Oh yeah, please buy our book when it comes out too ;).