Ob-Gyn Coding Alert

You could lose $177 for every TAH/BSO submitted to Medicare. Get ready for another year of nail-biting to find out if your Medicare payments will be slashed. "The update to the physician fee schedule conversion factor is -21.2 percent for CY 2010, notes the 2010 Medicare Physician fee schedule Final Rule, printed in the Federal Register that will be published on Nov. 25. Traditionally, Congress has stepped in to reverse such dramatic cuts before they took place, but unless that happens this year, you'll face a conversion factor of $28.4061 effective Jan. 1, according to calculations in the Federal Register. Example: If your ob-gyn bills Medicare for a TAH/BSO (58150, Total abdominal hysterectomy [corpus and cervix], with or without removal of tube[s], with or without removal of ovary[s]) in 2009, your relative value units (RVUs) would be 26.07. With the current conversion factor of $36.0666, that equals $940.26. In [...]