Radiology Coding Alert

Presented by Jim Collins, CPC, CHCC

The following supplement to Radiology Coding Alert is the transcript of a teleconference presented in June 2005 by The Coding Institute. Some information may have changed, be sure to check payer guidelines and your current coding manuals. To obtain the slides for the conference, please log on to our Online Subscription System at http://codinginstitute.com/login and open the PDF version of the current issue, and the slides will be contained therein. If you're not sure how to use the Online Subscription System or need help opening the issue, please contact our customer service department at 1-800-508-2582 or service@medville.com, and one of our representatives will be able to assist you.

The speaker for the teleconference, Jim Collins, CPC, CHCC, is president of Compliant MD, Inc. and CEO of The Cardiology Coalition. As a speaker, Jim excels at making complex billing and documentation regulations easy to understand and apply in practice.  Mr. Collins conducted the first ever specialty specific assessment of the E/M documentation guidelines which revealed that certified coders, averaging twelve years of experience, agreed on the same CPT Code in only 48% of cases. The findings from this unique assessment led to the clarification of several "grey areas" in the documentation guidelines that will be presented in this conference.
Thank you very much Mandy and good morning to everybody across the country who is joining in today.  I am Jim Collins and we are going to be talking about evaluation management documentation and billing, which is really a topic that anybody in the healthcare field knows has been a topic for several years now and one that is really not going to be going away.  So it is an area that we are all somewhat familiar with, just because we have been forced to consider it and a lot of physicians are burdened by these regulations, everybody that bills basically any insurance company in the United States is impacted by these rules. Clarifications From CMS Make Burden Of E/M Regulations Easier To Bear The rules are relatively vague; they are gray, they can be interpreted in totally different ways.  However, if we fail to follow these rules or if we ignore the rules, we can be heavily penalized and it makes it very important for people to understand these rules.  I am going to be presenting today a really physician friendly overview of these regulations--and is not even an overview, it is a physician friendly in depth review of these rules.  So, if you have got physicians in the room, they are going to get a lot of benefit from it.  Also if you have [...]