Health Care Terms
AHA
American Hospital Association.
APC
Ambulatory procedure code is used CMS to assign payment of outpatient and ambulatory procedure services.
CMS
Center for Medicare and Medicaid services.
CPC
Certified Procedural Coder.
CPT Code
Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) is used to identify the specific service provided by a health care provider.
DRG
Diagnostic related group used by CMS to assign payment for inpatient services.
Gross Collections
Payments divided by charges.
ICD-9 Code
International Classification of Diseases, 9th edition. Widely used classification system employed to codify diseases and medical conditions.
JCAHO
Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
Net Collections
Payments divided by charges minus contractual adjustments.
WRVU
The Work Relative Value Unit (WRVU) accompanies a CPT code to provide a weighted value to measure the provider’s time, complexity, and expertise required to perform a medical service.
The WRVU is added to the overhead and malpractice RVU totals to create the Total Relative Value Unit (TRVU) to assign a weighted value to measure the time, space, staff, expenses, etc., required to provide a medical service. The Department of Medicine focuses primarily on the WRVU as this is the most relevant data for the providers.
