Wiki How Many Procedural Cases a Day is the Norm?

[acochran1106@gmail.com]

Hi! I was wondering for a medical coder who works at a private practice for cardiology (interventional, general, and EP) and is the only coder for 14 providers what the norm would be for the amount of reports being submitted a day?

I only code for hospital procedures. So I am doing all of the interventional, general, and EP coding for all 14 of our providers. They want me submitting 100 or more procedures per week (so 20 procedures a day). All of our providers are going to the hospitals here every day and performing some kind of procedure. Some are doing multiple procedures a day too.

On top of this I also help with credentialing, pulling hospital records for those who do not have access, and answering any coding questions for our authorization department/my coworkers might have.

Is this too much? I just want to know what is too much and or if this is the average for a practice wanting this amount out of their only medical coder.

Thank you!

 

[amyjph]

I think it depends on a number of things and how the practice is set up. Are you coding from scratch meaning 100% abstraction of the diagnoses and procedures with data entry and billing? Are you doing exception coding or more of edit work where they enter the codes and you are doing an overview or correction after it goes through a claim scrubber? Do you constantly have to stop to answer phones, questions, pull records for others, do you work A/R and appeals too? You cannot be expected to code correctly or efficiently if you are constantly being sidetracked with other duties. Are you able to focus/code and be left alone for blocks of time? Nothing used to drive me crazier at places where coders are being interrupted all the time or stacked with other duties where they cannot focus on coding. Coders need to be able to focus and code.

I have not routinely coded cardiology before but in the exposure I have had to it, it seems to be quite a complicated specialty to code. I think if you were 100% focused on coding and had no other duties that may be a "normal" number. If not, I am not so sure. That's a lot of providers for only one person. Do you ever have to do inpatient/outpatient E/M too?

MGMA has benchmark data: https://www.mgma.com/
Specialty societies usually have practice management data too: https://scai.org/

20 per day seems reasonable on the surface however, it depends on what else you are being asked to do every day and the complexity of the charts.