General Surgery Coding Alert

Evidence of patient's critical status is absolutely required To determine if your surgeon actually provided critical care services, you-ll need to ask important questions about the patient's status. And after you have identified an encounter as critical care, you-ll need to be sure that the surgeon has documented the critical care time meticulously to file a proper claim. You-ll also need to decide which services are part of the critical care package and which services you may report separately. With so much to consider, ease your burden with this step-by-step approach. 1. Make Sure Patient Is Critically Ill or Injured You-ll first want to find out if the patient has a critical illness or injury.-If the patient is not critically ill or injured, you cannot report critical care services and should instead rely on an appropriate standard E/M service code, says Shelley Bellm, CPC, physician relations and coding manager at [...]