Pathology/Lab Coding Alert

You'll see little growth to pathologists' fees

The big winners on Medicare's 2005 Physician Fee Schedule are labs that provide the technical component (-TC) of many cytopathology and pathology services. Although the fee schedule update for 2005 is only 1.5 percent, you'll see a larger boost in pay for those services that show an increase in relative value units (RVUs).

For the table to the right, we've selected procedures that demonstrate the greatest pricing change for 2005 and listed their total non-facility RVU impact. "Although the global fee also increases for many of these services, the -TC accounts for the majority of the increase," says R.M. Stainton Jr., MD, president of Doctor's Anatomic Pathology, an independent pathology laboratory in Jonesboro, Ark. Only codes CPT 88347 , 88349 and 88358 show a large decline in RVU for either the technical or professional component.

You can access a complete list of RVUs in the Nov. 15, 2004, Federal Register on the Internet at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fedreg/frcont04.html. To calculate the national fee amount for a service, multiply the RVUs by the 2005 conversion factor of $37.8975.