Cardiology Coding Alert

Here’s what you need to have to ethically report the higher-valued code The threat: If your cardiologist’s documentation doesn’t clearly indicate what the physician did, you could be one of the cardiology practices losing out on reimbursement for peripheral procedures performed with heart catheterization, says Jackie Miller, RHIA, CPC, senior consultant with Coding Strategies Inc in Powder Springs, Ga. Here’s how to point out mistakes to your cardiologists and enable you to submit the claim the procedure deserves. Go In-Depth With the Problem
Poor documentation can mean missing out on ethical income. For example, Medicare pays much more for a selective renal angiogram (with catheterization of the renal arteries) than for a nonselective renal angiogram (with the catheter positioned in the aorta).-But many cardiologists don’t note whether they catheterized the renal arteries, so you end up reporting a nonselective angiogram, Miller says. Similar problems crop up with lower-extremity angiograms: [...]