Wiki Spine Surgery Education

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Emmalia

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Highland, NY
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Hi All,
My practice is getting a spinal surgeon soon and my spine coding is definitely rusty. Any suggestions for good webinars, books, conferences or other educational material? I'll take it all :)
Thank you!
 
difference b/w 22600, 22630, 22633

There is a spine webinar on here from 3/7/18. My biggest problem when doing research, is that everyone uses the same terminology that the CPT book uses without explaining what the terminology means. My biggest hurdle initially was 22600, 22630, 22633. I felt these code sets sounded pretty much identical and i couldn't figure out why interspace and interbody made it different (and i found a lot of people who seemed to be having the same problem). I finally came to the conclusion that 22600 is when they are using only rods and bone grafting to fuse the back part of the vertebra (around the pedicles and/or spineous processes). 22630 is when they use a PEEK cage or structural allograft between the body (anterior) part of the vertebra, fusing the space where the disc was. And 22633 is when they use both methods together, rods on the back and a spacer in the front. This is probably an over simplified way of looking at it but it helped me discern the difference. You count the the space between the vertebra b/c you can't have a fusion with just one bone, so you need two bone to create one interspace that gets fused. A big rule to know is that medicare does not allow you use those codes with decompression codes but you can for commercial insurance if the discectomy work is for decompression. If you look at the NCCI policy manual, it tells you this.
I'm still working on getting really comfortable with all of the decompression codes :)
Megan-CPC-A
 
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