EM Coding Alert

With the MDM coding, the provider who bills for the substantive portion assumes responsibility for the plan and the associated risks.

Regarding time-based coding, your providers should include distinct time they spent with the patient providing services. The CPT^® guidelines define distinct time in the same way you’d bill based on time. Professional time for a physician or other qualified healthcare professional (QHP) includes:

• “Preparing to see the patient (eg, review of tests)
• Obtaining and/or reviewing separately obtained history
• Performing a medically appropriate examination and/ or evaluation
• Counseling and educating the patient/family/ caregiver
• Ordering medications, tests, or procedures
• Referring and communicating with other health care professionals (when not separately reported)
• Documenting clinical information in the electronic or other health record
• Independently interpreting results (not separately reported) and communicating results to the patient/family/caregiver
• Care coordination (not separately reported)”

The guidelines also provide direction on which activities do not count toward time spent with the patient:

• Performing other separately reported services
• Travel
• General teaching and that isn’t limited to discussing the specific patient’s management
• Count Time Correctly

Distinct time is the amount of time each provider spends working on the patient independently. However, if both the physician and the APP are seeing the patient simultaneously, then only one of them can count the time. Typically, the physician will count the time, so the visit can be billed at the higher physician rate.

Remember: “You can’t double count that time. What I usually tell my providers is you need to document and use the word ‘distinct’ and make sure that you’re documenting what your distinct time is,” said Christopher Chandler, MHA, MBA, CPC, CGSC, technical manager of coding and reimbursement for lntermountain Health during his “Don’t Gamble on Incorrectly Billing for Advanced Practice Provider Services” session at AAPC’s HEALTHCON 2024.

He added “Throw the word ‘distinct’ in the documentation — it makes your claim a little more defendable, a little more accurate, and it’s going to help in the long run.”

Choose Billing Option Carefully

Sometimes one provider will end up spending more time overall performing services with the patient, which can sway the time percentage significantly toward one provider over another. The other provider may not like this unequal distinct time split.

“The thing that I’ve heard from some physicians is that they don’t like the definition of distinct time as spending greater than 50 percent of the time with the patient,” Chandler said. The providers may feel upset because the APP could spend more than half of the time performing tasks and then get to bill under their NPI.

However, thinking that only face-to-face time counts toward determining time spent on the patient is a common misconception about basing the billing provider on time spent providing services. The Medicare Claims Processing Manual states “The substantive portion can be entirely with or without direct patient contact, and is determined by the proportion of total time, not whether the time involves patient contact.”

“This means that if the physician can do [the tasks listed above] a lot faster and a lot more efficiently, the APP gets to bill for the encounter because they spend greater than 50 percent of the time performing the tasks,” Chandler continued.

He added that if the physician is concerned about the distinct time split, then they should consider basing the appropriate E/M code off MDM.

Michael Shaughnessy, BA, CPC, Development Editor