Primary Care Coding Alert

Measurement, report, location ensures coding accuracy. Patience is a virtue, particularly when it comes to coding lesion removal. Waiting for the pathology report to come back is critical for choosing the correct benign or malignant excision set. Use these steps to prevent mislabeling a patient and assigning a lesser paying code. Step 1: Encourage Your FPs to Measure First You should select the appropriate lesion excision size code based on the physician's report. "If the physician doesn't measure the lesion before he cuts it out, he's cutting his reimbursement in half," says John F. Bishop, PA-C, CPC, MS, CWS, president of Tampa, Fla.-based Bishop and Associates. Once the specimen is put in the jar, the specimen shrinks down to half its original size, Bishop says. If the doctor doesn't put the original size in the note, the coder has to code based on the smaller excision size listed in the [...]