Cardiology Coding Alert

Presented by Jim Collins, CPC, CHCC The following supplement to Cardiology Coding Alert is the transcript of a teleconference presented by The Coding Institute. To obtain the slides for the conference, please log on to our Online Subscription System at http://codinginstitute.com/login and download the current issue, and the slides will be contained therein. If you're not sure how to use the Online Subscription System or need help downloading the issue, please contact our customer service department at 1-800-508-2582 or service@medville.com, and one of our representatives will be able to assist you.

The speaker for the teleconference, Jim Collins, CPC, CHCC is the Chief Executive Officer of the Cardiology Coalition, a professional society dedicated to advocacy efforts for cardiologists and the billing proficiency of cardiology practices.  Mr. Collins has over twelve years experience as a physician reimbursement consultant and limits his practice to cardiology related issues (procedural auditing, E&M auditing, revenue cycle optimization, staff training and physician training.) He is the Consulting Editor of Cardiology Coding Alert and is a seasoned national speaker on cardiology documentation and reimbursement. Thank you.  Good morning to everybody that is calling in today, and thank you for attending.  We are going to cover pretty much everything that you need to know as far as diagnostic heart catheterization and coronary interventions and also information specific to - what I am sure everybody is seeing as a growing trend - limited peripheral vascular studies at the same time as the heart catheterization.  In working in this field, I am sure that a lot of you have been contradicted by historical coding methodologies, and the current ones and how we are seeing the clinical side of everything change, so this is really going to be a conference that is geared exactly towards where you are.  We will cover everything that you need to know not on the basic level, but kind of at an intermediate and higher level. 

The first thing that I want to do, just to make sure that the people who are with us who may not be too seasoned at coding heart catheterizations, is to take a few minutes to cover what a heart cath consists of, because I know a lot of times understanding these procedures and understanding why we are doing these procedures actually helps to go through an operative report and pull out the appropriate codes to bill them accurately.  This stuff is really intimidating when you first get into it so, on the bottom of page 1, I have got a brief summary of what the circulatory system is, and this is of course specific to the human anatomy.  First off, the [...]