Health Information Compliance Alert

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published corrections for “technical errors” to the calendar year (CY) 2021 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) in the Federal Register on March 18, including additions previously made to the Medicare telehealth services list.

Rollback: As part of the MPFS final rule that came out in December 2020, CMS added 60 new telehealth codes to its approved list and created “Category 3” as a place to list approved telehealth codes through the duration of the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE).

Now: Four codes were “inadvertently” put on the “Category 3” list that shouldn’t have been added, CMS says in the notice. The agency is removing the codes with the change retroactive to Jan. 1, 2021. The four CPT^® codes impacted include:

• 99221-99223 (New or Established Patient Initial Hospital Inpatient Care Services...)
• +96121 (Neurobehavioral status exam (clinical assessment of thinking, reasoning and judgment, [eg, acquired knowledge, attention, language, memory, planning and problem solving, and visual spatial abilities]), by physician or other qualified healthcare professional, both face-to-face time with the patient and time interpreting test results and preparing the report; each additional hour (List separately in addition to code for primary procedure)

Resource: Review the notice at www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-03-18/pdf/2021-05548.pdf.