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Primary Care Coding Alert

CCI Edits 18.3:

Pay Special Attention to Suture Repairs, Pain Injections to Keep Coding on Track

Published on Mon Nov 05, 2012

Latest coding edits touch on some of your most common procedures. The latest Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) edits went into effect Oct. 1, 2012, with sweeping changes that involved more than 233,000 new edit pairs -- including new pairs related to everyday procedures such as suture repairs. Positive side: Not many of the thousands of changes will directly impact your family medicine coding. Read on to learn which new code pairs will matter most to your physicians. Ignore Suture Repair With Integumentary Procedures CCI 18.3 includes suture repair of skin incisions, punctures, or lacerations (including codes 12001 to 13153) with most codes for integumentary system (skin) procedures. For example, repair codes are now included in the following: 10060 (Incision and drainage of abscess [e.g., carbuncle, suppurative hidradenitis, cutaneous or subcutaneous abscess, cyst, furuncle, or paronychia]; simple or single) and 10061 (... complicated or multiple) 10120 (Incision and removal of foreign body, [...]
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