Wiki 20 minutes spent in counseling

Did they specify the length of the visit or just 20 min care coordination. Also did they state what care coordination and counseling they did?

Well if its 20 it is lower than a level 5 as it would need to be at least 21 min of a 40+ min face to face visit

99214 would require at least 50% of the time listed in the code description so the visit would need to be a minimum of 25 minutes face to face
 
It would be a 99213, but they need to document the total time, the content of the counseling and that greater than 50% of the visit was spent in counseling and coordination of care.
 
I have recently started at a Behavioral health clinic and I have a similar issue with a physician on using time based coding on virtually all of her services. She has 40 minute appts blocked for certain patients and bills based on that time for visit. She will include "Medication Change to ...", "Review lab work" "Notes to school regarding medication change" and documents under it Counseling and Coord of Care. I see the her documentation is a part of MDM (were she gets this credit) and which is built into the RVU's for the code.. The severity is not high, but she feels she needs to spend more time with certain patients. But again, it is almost across the board she bases codes on duration. (She has been billing a huge # of level 5's)
 
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