ED Coding and Reimbursement Alert

Check out this advice on 'split'CC visits. When the ED physician leaves a critically ill patient's bedside to attend to another matter, that does not mean you have to permanently stop counting critical care minutes --though you do have to stop counting minutes until the critical care resumes. Physicians Provide Non-Consecutive Critical Care "Critical care time does not need to be continuous; for example, the physician could provide 35 minutes of CC inthe morning, then 23 more in the afternoon," offers Michael Lemanski, MD, billing director at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass. Consider this example, courtesy of Lemanski: The ED physician treats a 68-year-old woman with cirrhosis. She has a history of alcoholism and, upon presentation,she appears very pale, hypotensive, and tachycardic. The physician orders two large bore IVs so she can administer fluid boluses and get the patient crossmatched for blood. The physician documents that she spent 67 [...]