Billings Books

Paradoxically, physicians' compensation has shrunk in spite of the dramatically rising wave of health care costs. Arcane billing terminology, continuous downward pressure on allowed fees, systematic invention of new reasons for underpayments and denials, coordinated drive to oligopsony, and escalating campaign for more post-payment audits, refunds, and penalties - that's only a partial list of a growing arsenal designed by the insurers to increase their share value at the expense of health care providers.

This book focuses on designing accountable and transparent billing processes that firmly place control back into the hands of the practice owner. In contrast to many billing books that separate billing from the rest of practice operations, this book takes a broader all-encompassing perspective and provides an excellent set of tools to evaluate the efficacy of your billing. It uses an analytical approach to present concrete, practical information including procedures and policies that focus on setting up billing and collection, controlling patient payments, and handling third-party insurers. Multiple flowcharts, graphs, and tables elucidate the tremendous complexity of the billing process.

Don't buy this book if you know your practice has already maximized its billing. Do buy this book and return to it frequently if you are looking for a text to help you design a process to maximize your billing and collections.

Yuval Lirov, Practicing Profitability - Billing Network Effect for Revenue Cycle Control in Healthcare Clinics and Chiropractic Offices: Collections, Audit Risk, SOAP Notes, Scheduling, Care Plans, and Coding

I had decided to start a Medical Billing Center and purchased all the software, etc. All I needed was examples to try to see if I could really do medical billing. With Dr. Doe, I was able to practice and get a full overlook of the office. This book gave me a complete one weeks work of doctor billing. This book does not leave out any details!! It is complete in the world of billing. It includes real diagnosis, superbills, explanation of benefits, to copies of insurance cards. Now that I have signed a real doctor, I think this book gave me the incouragment and experience that I was looking for, and let me know that I could do this. This is truly a MUST HAVE!!!

A shocking note Americans don't know about medical bills: They don't reflect the costs of the medicine itself. "Mired in the Health Care Morass: An Alaskan Takes On America's Dysfunctional Medical System for his Uninsured Daughter" is the tale of accomplished author and geophysicist Neil Davis's fight against the American Health care system and how it is extorting Americans when they are at their most vulnerable - when they are ill themselves or deathly concerned for the well being of their loved ones. With advice to fight these corrupt practices and get the more correct and proper hospital bill, "Mired in the Health Care Morass: An Alaskan Takes on America's Dysfunctional Medical System for his Uninsured Daughter" is highly recommended for anyone who has been scorned by the American health care system and for community library social issues shelves everywhere.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

The reason I think this a 5 stars book beacuse it help helps me understand New Yorks History. It Has many things I didn't know until now.

So much of the time we receive our history distilled by other people's views. Of course there's nothing wrong with this, but sometimes it is refreshing to read what the people at that time thought was happening. Documents like the ones collected in Warren Billing's book are often the only way we know of certain events and practices, especially in seventeenth century Virginia, when so little was recorded and so little is known.
Mr. Billing's notes on the chapters give context and an experienced evaluation, but the best thing is to dig into the documents themselves. The chapter on the lifestyle and treatment of the African people in Virginia is especially interesting and brings up a section of history usually forgotten or ignored. Because so many of our founding fathers were from Virginia, the seventeenth century background is important to understand the laws and lifestyle they were coming from.
Virginia is well known as a center of colonial revolt in the eighteenth century. This book shows the often forgotten story of the just as important previous century through the eyes of those who experienced it.

I had the pleasure of reading Olympic Media: Inside the Biggest Show on Television by Andrew Billings two months before the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. Being a sports enthusiast and Olympics junkie, the only fix for my Beijing addiction prior to this book was the occasional Olympic Torch tidbit on the evening news or a visit to the official website of the IOC. Thankfully, Olympic Media came along in time to sufficiently whet my appetite for the largest sports spectacle in the world.

What Billings has accomplished in his examination of NBCs telecast of the Olympics is remarkable. He offers in-depth observations and analyses of the telecast by focusing on organizational processes, production influences, and viewer perceptions of this cultural (and often political) megaevent. In terms of cultural significance, the only other sporting event that rivals the importance of the Olympics is World Cup soccer. It is rare to find a study that explores the media effects process from inception (i.e., NBCs eight-year pre-production planning) to reception (i.e., viewer reactions to and perceptions of the Games). In just under 200 pages, Billings conducts interviews with the gatekeepers and storytellers at NBC Sports, performs content analyses of primetime coverage from the last 10 years of Olympic telecasts with a focus on themes of nationality, gender, and ethnicity, and analyzes the cultivating and agenda-setting effects of the Olympics telecast using survey data collected from viewers.

Chapter 1 opens with a historical review of the Olympic telecast. From the Berlin Summer Games in 1936 to the Torino Winter Games in 2006, he provides a review of key moments in Olympic telecast history. He concludes the chapter with sufficient rationale for this study (viewership, political influence, prestige, viewer attitudes) and his methods of analysis, and concludes with a preview of the remaining chapters.

Chapters 2 and 3 are quite possibly the most interesting chapters in the book because they contain interviews conducted with NBCs producers and reporters juxtaposed with relevant facets of the television production and narration process. Specifically, in chapter 2, Billings offers analyses and excerpts of his interviews with three producers and one director, most notably Dick Ebersol, executive producer of the Olympic telecast. Many questions concerning the evolution of the Olympic broascast are answered by Ebersol in this chapter, including decisions that directly impact viewership (e.g., Ebersol's decision to eliminate boxing from primetime). In chapter 3, Billings presents analyses and excerpts of interviews with seven NCA sportscasters including Bob Costas, primetime anchor, and Jim Lampley, the weekend/late-night anchor. For example, answers from Costas and Lampley to questions concerning "profiles and promotion" of prominent athletes that withdraw from competition or fail to win medals were illuminating and entertaining. Once again, Billings effectively synthesizes questions concerning the storytelling process with relevant, meaningful answers from a variety of sportscasters, many of which are former, multi-medal-winning Olympians.

Read more on this review in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Communication Studies, published by Marquette.

The stories in this book are interesting and well written. You really have to think hard about sentence structure and paragraph development to correctly answer the questions at the end of each story. My son is emotionally handicapped and gifted. This is the first book I've found that adequately challenges him and does not require him to do a lot of writing to complete his exercises. He actually enjoys doing his work now, something that has never happened before.

The basic premise of Rights And Liberties In The Biotech Age is that we need a 'Genetic Bill of Rights' to assure genetic developments are kept under close control - and that the public be protected from these developments. To this end, professor Krimsky's background in environmental policy and urban planning blends with freelance writer/Responsible Genetics program director Peter Shorett to bring together contributors from a range of fields who discuss such rights and liberties, from rights to genetic-free foods to life patents and scientific exchanges. An intriguing discussion emerges in essays filled with scholarship and backed by research.

This biography of Sara and Gerald Murphy was written with the contributions of Honoria, their only surviving child. It complements another, more recent, biography as it includes details from Honoria's childhood. Sara and Gerald were at the center of the Paris intellectual scene in the 1920s and early 1930s. They were friends with every serious artist and writer and Gerald has recently been acknowledged as a serious painter in his own right. Both of Honoria's brothers died as teenagers, a terrible blow to her parents. They continued on with life and Honoria was able to present them with grandchildren. This is a lovely book and tells a wondrous tale of an artistic life that we will never know. She had a magical childhood as the children were always at the center of their parents' lives.

A great book of prose-style journalism. I bought the book in hopes of finding a few extra facts for a historical novel I am writing. While this very brief book probably did not give me much in the way of "facts," it did put me in the mindset of 1872 Boston, the hopes, dreams, aspirations--and devastation--of so many.

The book is written in first person journalistic style giving a street by street, moment by moment account of the progress of the fire--from beginning to end. I read the entire book in less than thirty minutes, but the seamless, breathless reporting made it well worth the cost.

My only complaint is that Kessinger Publishing should have taken the extra time necessary to enhance the images. Most were very poor and difficult, if not impossible, to decifer. The author, himself, attributed any the book's success strictly to the beauty of the images. How disappointing the proper care was not taken to print them correctly.

Still, the author's beautiful reporting deserves five stars.