Wiki Palliative Care Inpatient and Outpatient

[lrmccann]

Good Afternoon,
Is there anybody in this group that bills for Palliative Care Inpatient and/or Outpatient. My office was just made aware of a few code changes at the beginning of the year and we have a few questions about what codes can be billed and when. I have googled so much information for the past two weeks and we are still going back and forth with other coders that work within the hospital. Since we are all new with this I thought getting outside help from somebody that already uses these codes would be beneficial. Also, our office will be launching home base care in July. The following codes are the codes I am interested in knowing more about; 99358, 99359, 99490, 99487, 99489, 99497, 99498. We were also wanting to get information on if there is a way to bill for family conferences and the time the provider's spend talking to pt's family on the phone.

Thank you

 

[CMORSE]

yes I work for Hospice, and we also have Pallative care that I code for. The new codes you have referred to are for Non face to face services and can be used for care and coordination of your patient. These codes are used for extraordinary amounts of time outside of an E/M visit, performing work that is related to that visit and does not involve face to face time, ie. extensive medical record review, review of diagnostic test results or other ongoing care management work. Since this is time based make sure that your providers are tracking their time and documenting as such. The time doesn't need to be on the same day.

Hope this helps!
Charlotte