Revenuecycle
Guru
Can someone tell me how to bill when a patient dies? The DOC dictated a note-discharge note, do I just bill a discharge code? The pt was in the hospital for over a month with terminal cancer.
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Wiki death
- Thread starter Revenuecycle
- Start date
RebeccaWoodward*
True Blue
FTessaBartels
Guest
Discharge or critical care
Depending on the care provided, you may be able to code critical care. (We did when a patient expired while still in the ICU.)
Otherwise, discharge day management.
Educate your doctors that this time-based code can include the time spent doing the paperwork / dictating final death note ... if all is done on the unit. When I shadowed the doctors for a week I found that they sometimes spent more than 30 minutes providing this service, but rarely documented the time, so were always billing 99238.
All that being said, some doctors do not like to charge for the day of death.
F Tessa Bartels, CPC, CPC-E/M
Depending on the care provided, you may be able to code critical care. (We did when a patient expired while still in the ICU.)
Otherwise, discharge day management.
Educate your doctors that this time-based code can include the time spent doing the paperwork / dictating final death note ... if all is done on the unit. When I shadowed the doctors for a week I found that they sometimes spent more than 30 minutes providing this service, but rarely documented the time, so were always billing 99238.
All that being said, some doctors do not like to charge for the day of death.
F Tessa Bartels, CPC, CPC-E/M