CARDIAC VALVE AND OTHER MAJOR CARDIOTHORACIC PROCEDURES WITH CARDIAC CATHETERIZATION WITHOUT CC/MCC DRG Code 218

Are you documenting overtime payments properly? A federal court has ordered a Philadelphia home care agency and its owner to pay about $1.6 million in back wages and liquidated damages to 288 workers deliberately denied overtime pay. The consent judgement [...]

If states build nursing registries, will workers come? Government officials, seniors, and providers of home care all seem to agree on one thing — keeping folks in their homes with state-provided home and community-based services is a great idea. But [...]

Don’t forget to assign counseling codes. Radiologists perform low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scans to evaluate eligible patients for possible lung cancer. While the LDCT screening is reported with 71271 (Computed tomography, thorax, low dose for lung cancer screening, without contrast [...]

Question: Several Medicare patients have come in for low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) lung cancer screening scans. I’m new to radiology coding, and I’m not sure what CPT® codes to report. What codes should I assign to report an LDCT scan? New [...]

Plus: Hospice stiffed its workers too, DOL says. If you were wondering how hard the feds are coming down on wage-related home care infractions, a group of cases this month will show you. Case #1: A Pennsylvania federal court has [...]

Question: How would I code for a repeat global c-section, T incision on uterus? I assume 59510 as I can’t find anything different. Is there an ICD-10 diagnosis code I should use to show this was done? I found ICD-10 [...]

Think of this as a survey of important code changes you need to know about. While some specialties have seen myriad code changes, coding primary care encounters means knowing at least a little about a lot of diagnoses. This article [...]

And say hello to a new chapter you’ve already seen. In last month’s Primary Care Coding Alert, we looked at some new external cause codes, along with new instructions for coding headaches and influenza, that will take effect on Oct. [...]

Don’t dismiss these updates, though there are indeed fewer than usual. The 2021 ICD-10-CM updates, which were released recently and go into effect Oct. 1, 2020, may not appear to affect ob-gyn practices as much as other years. But some [...]

Always report the code with the highest level of specificity, based on documentation. October 1 brings the next round of ICD-10-CM codes to both software and manuals, and if you’re not prepared, your claims could end up in limbo — [...]