Critical Care and MAYBE CPR
Be prepared to get a denial, or at least a request for documentation.
Assuming your documentation is all in order, you should be able to bill for:
cath w/ mod 53
CPR
Critical Care
Here's the difficult part ... In order to code BOTH CPR and critical care ...(assuming both were done by same person) ... You CANNOT use the time spent in CPR as part of critical care time.
So your documentation needs to have at least 30 minutes of critical care time that does not coincide with the CPR, if you code both.
When this was the case, I instructed my doctors to document: X minutes (has to be 30 min or more) spent in direct critical care of this patient, over and above CPR.
If you DON'T have at least 30 minutes of critical care time over and above CPR, then I'd code one or the other (for our commercial carriers I'd code the critical care; for Medicaid I'd code CPR - I work in pediatrics, so we aren't usually dealing with Medicare).
Don't forget your -25 modifier on the 99291 if you use it.
Oh ... and how did the patient do?
F Tessa Bartels, CPC, CPC-E/M