Pediatric Coding Alert

Time saver: Strike a balance between bean counting and example-driven coding. After circling relevant items on chart worksheet after chart worksheet, you might feel like scrapping those aides for CPT's clinical examples. Before you do so, consider these history gathering time savers. Look at Examples to Understand Guidelines Let clinical examples be your guide, suggests the AMA. "They are intended to serve as a tool to assist physicians in their understanding of the E/M codes and to guide them in determining appropriate E/M code levels," according to CPT Assistant's "Coding Communication" on E/M documentation guidelines (November 2008). While that advice can seem like a time saver as compared to using an audit worksheet, the method isn't practical. "The number of clinical examples needed to adequately convey the message of the E/M documentation requirements would be far too vast to be effective," says Suzan Hvizdash, CPC, CEMC, CEDC, senior manager of [...]