Understanding the complex process of accurate coding and billing is essential to a sustainable practice. As NPs, we are ultimately responsible for ensuring all coding and billing is accurate for each patient seen. For this Discussion, you will search the health care literature and summarize a peer-reviewed journal article published within the last five years.

To prepare:

• Select one of the following topics:
  • Applying for Medicare and Medicaid Provider Numbers
  • Application process for National Provider Identifier Number
  • Incident to billing
  • Coding-Evaluation & Management
  • Fraudulent billing
  • Billing Self-Pay patients
  • Managed Care Organizations
• Conduct a search and select a peer-reviewed journal article published within the last five years related to the topic you selected.

Note: For this Discussion, all students are to avoid all written work, which reviews or outlines coding and billing at previous or current worksites as well as previous or current practicum sites.

By Day 3

Post a brief summary of the article you selected. Include the key reimbursement issue addressed and how they would impact the NP in a collaborative practice versus and independent practice. Discuss an ethical or legal implication(s) associated with your article.

Textbook for class

Buppert, C. (2018). Nurse practitioner’s business practice and legal guide (6th ed.). Sudbury, MA: Bartlett & Jones Learning.

• Chapter 9, “Reimbursement for Nurse Practitioner Services” (pp. 311-325)

Provide an update on the progress of your capstone project. Content should be at least a page in length.

Note that no more than 15% of your submission should be comprised of quoted verbatim text from sources. Use sources to support your points and not to make them for you. ALL direct quotes and ALL sources need to be identified.

Discuss the following in your conversation:

• How is your employer responding to your project?
• Review your experiences of your Gemba with your instructor.
• What internal and external data sources have you identified?
• What successes and challenges have you encountered requesting or accessing data?
• How is the data helping to narrow down to a viable, short-term executable project?
• What other challenges are you encountering?
• What are you doing to work around the challenges?

Please include references

Week 2 Assignment: Federal Budget Activity

This week we learned about how laws get made by the legislative branch of our government. One of the biggest laws that regularly gets made by Congress is the Federal Budget.. The Federal Budget is a law that spells out how the government will spend its money. This is a huge power that Congress has that is often called, “The Power of the Purse.” If the Congress doesn’t give the government money to do something in the Budget, the government won’t have the resources do what it might want to do.

Part 1 – Create Your Budget

To create your budget, you must use the website: http://crfb.org/stabilizethedebt/

Once you are at http://crfb.org/stabilizethedebt/ and ready to begin click the “next” button.

Begin to make your budget selections by selecting various check boxes. Click the “i” icon next to each line item if you want more information about any particular budget line item.

Once you have sufficiently addressed each of the specific budget line items and arrived at the tab labeled “results,” right click the link labeled: “Save PDF,” download the file, and submit this final PDF file along with your text for the following essay.

*Do not forget to also submit your essay. You can upload multiple files in a single assignment submission. If you need help with this please contact your student advisor or instructor.

**It is strongly recommended that you use the Chrome or Firefox web browserfor this activity.  If you are having trouble getting your final results todisplay or are having difficulty exporting your final results as a PDFfile, please try the following steps:
(1)    Use the Chrome or Firefox web browser.
(2)    Take and upload screen shots of your budget selections to blackboardalong with your essay for this assignment.
(3)    Contact your instructor to make alternative arrangements.

Part 2 – Federal Budget Activity Reflection Essay

In at least 500 words answer the following questions:

• Provide a justification of the budget choices you made within one of the following categories: Defense, Domestic, Social Security, Healthcare (you may NOT choose to focus on the categories labeled: “Budget Path,” “Other,” “Revenue,” or “Tax Expenditures”). In this defense you must address possible counter arguments to the budget decisions you made. If you are spending more under this category how are you going to get new revenue or gain public support for more deficit spending? If you are cutting funds – what are you going to do with these surplus funds?
• Discuss how this assignment impacted your understanding of the budget process, and the debates between the parties and within Congress have regarding the federal budget? Do you think anything should be done to streamline the current budget process?
• Discuss how difficult this would have been to do this activity as a group project – what budget issues would have been contentious? How could you have come to a compromise?

*Don’t forget to upload your pdf file of the budget as well as the text of your essay in your assignment submission.

Please note: APA formatting and citations rules apply to this and all essays in this course.

As with all weekly written assignments, submit your work as an attached file. Double-space your paper and use 12 point Times New Roman as your font.

Effective Teachers

Stronge’s (n.d.) article, Qualities of Effective Teachers (Stronge, 2007), expands greatly on the topic of effective teaching. In it, he discusses personal qualities, management skills, instructional organization, implementing instruction, monitoring student performance, and professionalism. If you were to look at a standard comprehensive teacher evaluation system you might find these categories listed, or something quite similar. Kane, et al. (2011) in Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness, focus more on the process of teacher evaluation than the criteria; stating that districts can indeed identify effective teachers.

Kane et al.’s (2011) findings center on the work of Charlotte Danielson (2007) and her Framework for Teaching, a guide for instructional growth. Her Framework includes grading rubrics to allow trained principals to identify effective teacher performance, based upon specific descriptors. Many schools have adopted Danielson’s Framework for teacher evaluation because it takes away the vagueness of evaluations, creating specific examples associated with teacher performance quality. Further, it describes the act of teaching into four domains; Planning and Preparation, Classroom Environment, Professional Responsibilities, and Instruction (Danielson, 2007).

• In reviewing the articles by Stronge and Kane, what similarities do you see in the two articles that identify effective teaching?
• Are there some common characteristics listed in both articles?
• Can these be common characteristics be categorized into several key areas, as well? If so, what would you call them?

And, in looking again at the two articles;

• Are there any differences that one article identifies as an effective characteristic that is missing from the other?
• If so, why do you think one of them emphasizes what is felt to be an effective characteristic, while the other has either avoided or not included it in their list?

Post three to four well written paragraphs with your list of elements. For help on this assignment, you might want to review the Danielson Group website [Website] and the work of Charlotte Danielson in the Required Studies section.

Based on your readings, support your statements with evidence from the required studies and your research. Cite and reference your sources in APA style.

Click here for information on course rubrics.

References

Danielson, C. (2007). Enhancing professional practice: A framework for teaching (2nd ed.) Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Kane, T. J., Taylor, E. S., Tyler, J. H., & Wooten, A. L. (2011, Summer). Evaluating teacher effectiveness. Education Next, 11(3). Retrieved from http://educationnext.org/evaluating-teacher-effect…

Stonge, J. (2007). Qualities of effective teachers. In Qualities of effective teachers (2nd ed.). Retrieved from http://mnprek-3.wdfiles.com/local–files/teacher-e…