| A | B |
|---|
| Third-party payer | insurance company |
| insurance billing cycle | interaction between healthcare provider and insurance company |
| demographic information | patient's name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, sex, telephone number and insurance identification number |
| guarantor | person legally responsible for the patient |
| CMS 1500 form | universal claim form |
| medical necessity | services or supplies must be appropriate and necessary for symptoms, diagnosis and/or treatment |
| practice management software | type of software that deals with day-to-day operations of a medical practice |
| electronic protected health information (e-PHI) | protected health information that is transferred in electronic form |
| National Provider Identifier (NPI) | 10-digit intelligence free number |
| Employer Identification Number (EIN) | unique 9-digit number issued to businesses for use by the IRS |
| insurance identification card | unique identification card issued to subscribers |
| encounter form | multipurpose billing form |
| claims clearinghouse | company receives claims from healthcare providers and specializes in consolidating claims |
| direct claim submission | creating a "print image" file of the claim to use with direct claims software |
| "dial-ups" | a computer is programmed to automatically connect to another computer |
| optical character recognition (OCR) | recognition of printed or written text characters by a computer |
| American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) | most common format used for text files in computers and on Internet |
| mono-spaced fonts | each character takes up exactly the same amount of space |
| clean claims | claims that can be processed quickly without errors |
| claim attachment | supplemental documents that provide additional information to support claim |
