Cardiology Coding Alert

CPT guidelines state that a "physician may not report an in-person and remote interrogation of the same device during the same period." What to do: "Report only remote services when an in-person interrogation device evaluation is performed during a period of remote interrogation device evaluation," CPT says. Period defined: You should report remote interrogation codes 93294-93296 only once every 90 days and remote interrogation codes 93297-93299 only once every 30 days. "A period is established by the initiation of the remote monitoring or the 91st day of a pacemaker or implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) monitoring or the 31st day of an implantable loop recorder (ILR) or implantable cardiovascular monitor (ICM) monitoring and extends for the subsequent 90 or 30 days, respectively, for which the monitoring is occurring," per CPT guidelines. (Bold added for emphasis to indicate a published AMA correction: www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/3896.html.) Exception: A service center may report remote data acquisition [...]