Published on: 15 February 2020
Last Updated on: 23 June 2021
There has been no time more integral to the advancement of our society than the 21st century. The past 20 years have been essential to the technological increases that are impacting billions of people all across the globe. Many facets of our society have been affected in the modern era, and healthcare is one of the most impacted elements. There has been a transformation throughout the healthcare industry, as new technologies like procedural telemedicine, as well as new regulations, have become commonplace throughout the medical system. There is a multitude of different specialties in healthcare, but one of the top aspects is physical and occupational therapy. This facet is involved in helping people fix their bodily ailments without the use of more invasive procedures.
What is Physical and Occupational Therapy?
Physical and occupational therapy has become increasingly popular throughout the 21st century, as advancements in the field and a greater understanding of the body have helped to improve peoples’ wellbeing. Patients who frequently attend physical and occupational therapy often have chronic pain or muscular-skeletal issues that can be aided with different exercises and stretches that help to heal the body. Working as a physical or occupational therapist allows you to more effectively treat patients who need help and requires immense knowledge of the human body. As 2020 has already gotten underway, it has become evident that the many changes to the system, especially for Medicare patients, are continuing to affect physical and occupational therapy offices. Understanding these changes is essential if you work in this field.
Learning about the 2020 Medicare Changes for PTA & OTA Modifiers
Working as a PTA (physical therapy assistant) or OTA (occupational therapy assistant) has undergone immense change since the beginning of the new decade in 2020. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has altered its billing policies, which has impacted the modifiers used in your office as well as the reimbursement procedures provided by PTAs and OTAs. Medicare changes 2020 has been implemented as a payment differential in the ways that PTAs and OTAs are paid.
The payment rate is now 85% of the rate of what assistants are paid. CMS has noted that any care that exceeds 10% of the total time of care would now be subject to reduced billing. The payment differential has to be applied to all private practice facilities, home health agencies, hospital outpatient departments, as well as rehabilitation agencies.
The codes that this can be applied include therapeutic services, as well as administrative or non-therapeutic services. Any timed or untimed coded procedures and modalities are also included, such as re-evaluations and initial evaluations. These many changes also include new documentation which provides a short description of the application of modifiers.
While many of these changes may sound a bit challenging, understanding them is essential for the success of any physical or occupational therapy office.
Final Thoughts
Working in the physical or occupational therapy field can be very complex, especially when dealing with Medicare billing. Learning about the 2020 changes in Medicare billing is essential when running a physical or occupational therapy firm.
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Whenever you are up to for teeth whitening procedure the most part you should be careful about is choosing the best dentist for this purpose. There are many dentists out there who are not experienced, but still, they are self-labeled as experienced dentists.
Among the dentists, there are only a few ones who are trained and well experienced to provide safe and quality services. Make it sure that you search about the dentist before the one for you and select the right dentist of Invisalign Calgary or from any other area.
What Is Invisalign?
Invisalign are self-made aligners that are replaced every two weeks for the period of six or double months. They might be used for a longer time if the teeth are too much misaligned. These are similar to mouth retainers; aligner is mainly used for teeth treatments and known as one of the dental ways to move and properly fix them on their right place to have the beautiful and desired smile.
What Is the Process of Invisalign?
The process is very easy and pain-free. It has only five simple steps mentioned below:
1. Dentist’s Consultation:
The first step of the procedure is your consultation with one of the Invisalign Calgary dentist. During this consultation, the dentist examines your teeth thoroughly and then decide what you are in a serious need of Invisalign or not.
The patients are always welcomed by the dentists to ask the questions if they have some in their minds regarding the treatment. Questions might be like the cost of this procedure, the duration, or are there any side effects of this treatment or not.
2. Customized Treatment:
After the first step, the next is taking the x-rays marks of your teeth to know that from where your teeth need more alignment. This process is fully customized. This step is important because on the basis of the x-ray the dentists decided that which treatment will be the best one for you. After this step, the dentist will give you an idea of how much it will take for the alignment of your teeth, but the best results you’ll always get are after a year.
3. Get Your Invisalign Aligners:
Once your overall treatment plan is made, the dentist makes a set of customized aligners that you can wear for the proper alignment of your teeth. The best thing about the aligner is that they are smooth and made of plastic and they won’t even disturb you while sleeping or eating something. The aligners should be worn for at least 20 to 22 hours daily as if you require the best result in less time. You can also remove the aligners while eating something or brushing your teeth.
4. Change Aligners After Every Two Week:
The new aligner means a step forward to better teeth. The aligners are required to be changed within every two weeks. The dentists provide the patients with a set of aligner after two weeks.
5. Smile Confidently:
After the complete procedure, you are ready to smile with the best teeth without any defect. It is necessary to take care of your teeth even if the treatment is finished to have long-lasting effects. The patients are recommended to keep using the retainers to secure the position of their teeth.
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The holiday season is officially over, which means it’s time to start working off some of the extra pounds you picked up at mom’s house. While people generally love the idea of looking like the dudes who do commercials for home-exercise equipment, most of us still hate working out and dieting. If you are one of them, don’t worry. There are a ton of startups offering the kind of motivation you need in the form of mobile apps. Such apps use activity tracking as well as fitness and health risk assessment apps.
Today we’ll be exercising our startup muscles by taking a look at some of these young companies and what makes them tick.
8 Motivations to Start Up Health & Fitness:
Fitness gamification is huge right now, which makes sense given that it adds a much-needed dimension of play to the arduous task of getting fit. A great example of fitness gamification is Tep, which is basically a cross between a fitness tracker and a Tamagotchi; though, in the case of Tep, the star is a niftily-designed giraffe rather than a globular cluster of black pixels.
The more a user exercises, the better the giraffe does (users can buy their long-necked pets treats with rewards points they earn from walking, running and cycling). If users slack off, though, it’s curtains for the poor creature.
According to the app’s creators, a group of five super-talented self-starters from Szeged, Hungary, «Tep’s competitive edge relies on emotional connection and the mental „threat“ that the beloved pet might suffer from the lack of proper physical activity and thus offers a solution for curve fatigue effect.»
Does that sound a little dark? Sure. But it’s for a good cause. The founding team’s goal is to help users lose eight million pounds of fat in the next three years; there’s also talk of buying a giraffe.
The founding team built Tep on their own time and dime, but are currently funded by Traction Tribe and prizes from Microsoft’s Imagine Cup.
Tep is available in beta for Android and Windows phones, with an iOS version coming soon.
Wokamon
If you like the idea of a digital workout buddy helping you toe the line, but giraffes aren’t really your thing, then you might dig Wokamon, which comes to us from Mars Zhu and Hazim Abdul Hamid of Noodum.
Wokamon features dozens of animated monsters that get bigger and stronger as you do. Since it comes with a pedometer and syncs with wearables like Jawbone, Fitbit, and Up, you can be sure that every calorie burned gets counted and fed to your growing army of critters.
Connecting with friends on social media through Wokamon earns you reward points, which you can burn on unlocking new creatures.
Noodum and Wokamon are currently being funded by an $18,000 seed investment from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Innospace Incubator.
Gamified fitness apps like Wokamon and Tep have a lot of options when it comes to future monetization. They can either take the Zombies, Run! The approach of charging for downloads (which works if you’re as niche and well-made as that app) or offer in-app purchases for things like new backgrounds, characters, or crystals and boosters for your pet monsters.
For now, though, we can take advantage of both Tep and Wokamon for free.
Teamster
Teamster is an iOS app that, contrary to its name, has absolutely nothing to do with trucking. What teamster does do, though, is help you connect with other people in your area who are interested in the same sorts of athletic activities as you.
Conveniently, users are able to identify which sports they like and their level of skill in each on a scale of 1 to 5, which means you won’t be totally outmatched when you meet up for a game with other users.
When you find another user who shares your interests and skill set, swipe right in the app to add them to your team. Sounds like Tinder is ubiquitous, doesn’t it? Users can then create activities for other users or teams to join.
Teamster comes to us from the Melbourne based duo of Henry Chan and 22-year old Sam McCallum, who has a background in competitive running, cycling, and skiing.
Actually, 2015 is shaping up to be an awesome year for apps that bring social networking logic to the gym. Take Boston-based Perspyre, for example, which is coming out soon with a beta version for Android and iOS.
The whole point of Perspyre is connecting people who love to sweat and giving them access to workouts, advice, and motivation. Users can log into the app via Facebook and take post-workout selfies, record workouts, and brag about new personal records.
Though it’s admittedly a little intense for beginners, Persypre is perfect for those who are already «motivated and dedicated» enough to willingly visit Crossfit and P90x classes.
Perspyre is the brainchild of Jason Chisholm and Jeremy Mays and has received $25,000 in seed funding from John Piret of the investment firm Newbury Piret & Co.
If Perspyre sounds like it’s right up your alley, keep an eye out for the soon-to-be-launched SternFit iOS app which also gives workout buffs a great platform for sharing pics, tips, and workouts.
Rocket Journey
If your meteoric rise to peak physical perfection is still in the launch phase, you’ll find a helpful companion in RocketJourney, which bills itself as the «smartest and friendliest way to a fitness lifestyle.»
The app’s founding trio of Carlos Ayala, Pablo Artee, and Ernesto Cambuston has received funding from 500 Startups, the seed fund and startup accelerator comprised of Google and PayPal alums.
RocketJourney tracks all of your fitness activities from cycling to yoga to lifting to competitive eating — just kidding about that last one — and verifies that you’ve actually worked out through GPS and wearables integration.
The app motivates you to stick to your fitness regime by giving you points for completed workouts and taking away points for missed ones. The same logic holds true for user-created «teams» which add the pinch of peer-pressure that it just might take to keep you on track.
You can register for updates on RocketJourney’s release on the website.
OneSet
OneSet — «Vine for Fitness» — is another promising app to stay tuned for in the months to come. Users can create 15-second videos demonstrating an exercise or «stack» other users’ videos into workouts.
Since videos are organized by muscle group or goal, it’s easy to find the right moves for you.
OneSet’s founding team is based in Waterloo, Canada, and consists of brothers Amad and Shameel Abdullah, as well as full-stack developer George Xu.
GYM radio
Sometimes all it takes to reach the athlete within is finding the right music to sweat to, or the right gym to do it in.
Though GYM radio’s online music streaming service has been around since 2013, its new iOS, Android, and Windows phone releases have made it easier than ever to get amped up and pumped up at the same time.
The app features three music settings — cardio, gym, and hardcore-tailored to give your workout the right feel. Here’s the best part: GYM radio is completely ad-free, which means your runners high won’t get interrupted by voice-actors pitching toothpaste or discount car insurance.
GYM radio also offers a premium upgrade which, for a monthly or yearly subscription, will let you listen offline, skip songs, and get access to material unavailable on the standard version.
Gymhopper
Gymhopper — «Uber for gyms»- is a Swiss startup that aims to help you find the right gym by offering its users discounted individual training passes. Gyms benefit from the app by getting a little extra exposure as well as a shot at their target market, people who are actively searching for a new place to get sweaty.
Gymhopper is currently in series A fundraising but expects an iOS release later this year.
What can fitness startups learn from RunKeeper?
Figuring out how to actually make money with your app is a problem that can plague even the biggest of startup fish. Each of the aforementioned apps will have to figure out the right monetization strategy for their product and user-base. One good model employed by the leading fitness tracker RunKeeper is to partner with other businesses to provide sponsored advertising to users.
That means Teamster’s users could theoretically get discounts on Nike products for showing up at local softball games, and Perspyre users could get 25% off gym memberships for visiting p90x classes 3 times a week.
There are a lot of good ways to get back in shape, and a lot of good startups out there creating more every day.
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Most Americans agree that healthcare is important. Deciding who pays for quality healthcare is where disagreement begins. That part isn’t surprising. What many people fail to realize, is how unfounded disagreement can translate into unfair outcomes. Fortunately, Dylan Scott at Vox visualized the state of American healthcare in five sobering charts. His revelations were based on data published by the US Census Bureau in 2016, but that doesn’t make them any less compelling. According to Scott, everything from geopolitics and age to racial or ethnic heritage and even employment status can have a huge impact on healthcare. In other words, countless citizens live somewhere that doesn’t necessarily prioritize public access to affordable healthcare, and they don’t even realize it.
The problems appear too complex to outsiders. That alone prevents the grand majority of them from trying to address things. Nevertheless, those individuals devoted to understanding the issues point to only a few key variables. For instance, Olga Khazan at The Atlantic highlighted three main reasons why our healthcare system is the worst amongst developed countries. Inadequate healthcare insurance coverage is the first obstacle, and with more than 27 million uninsured Americans, it’s no joking matter. Administrative inefficiency is another serious impediment, but it’s also unsurprising given the profit incentive. Everyone wants a piece of the proverbial pie. The final culprit is our primary care services, which are fragmented and disorganized to the point of sometimes inhibiting patient treatment.
Conscientious writers like Olga aren’t the only ones publicizing the dismal state of affairs. Scholars from the foremost universities have begun to express similar sentiments when it comes to the healthcare system. Karen Feldscher at The Harvard Gazette promoted a joint study orchestrated by Harvard and the London School of Economics. According to the research, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), “The US has substantially higher spending, worse population health outcomes, and worse access to care than other wealthy countries.” The authoring researchers pinpointed administrative costs, prescription pharmaceuticals, and average annual salaries as the primary drivers of rampant healthcare prices.
Comparing our healthcare system to those instituted abroad rarely makes sense. While the federal government vows to protect minors and has safety nets for the elderly, the status quo can quickly betray either group, depending on the nature of the scenario. Our elders are especially susceptible to disastrous possibilities without sufficient care. Many of the educated ones rely on specialized groups like Easy Medicare to investigate insurance eligibility and coverage details. The process isn’t nearly as intuitive when your health is already in decline, which is precisely why professional groups and services exist. It’s fair to say that without such support, still more people might fall by the wayside.
Universal healthcare is likely to become increasingly popular if the described trends continue unabated. The healthcare outcomes are unsustainable and they seem to reflect the income inequalities and other disparities that plague America. The best that some of us can do, for the time being, is choose wisely between residing in a red or a blue state. Nisarg Patel at Slate emphasized as much just last year. According to him, “The battleground over healthcare has moved out of the national sphere and into state politics.” While the idea of moving for the sake of healthcare and medical attention might sound foreign to some individuals, numerous Americans have firsthand experience.
Suffice it to say that the national healthcare system is not in an ideal condition. Debating the subject and advocating for better policies are both meaningful steps. It is our collective duty to demand appropriate healthcare for each and every person, regardless of circumstance or socioeconomic standing. Anything less ought to be considered a tragic betrayal.
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