Mel C
New Member
Hi my name Mel C CPC, I have work for the University Department of Geriatric Medicine for two years. In short I do billing and coding for nursing and boarding homes. I was reading the AAPC Healthcare Business Monthly and came across a article on page 14, about Billing Prolonged Services with Direct Patient Contact. My question is have anyone out there used these codes? As I said I have only been doing this for 2 years the women before me never did and she retired, I spoke with my Practice Manager and our Billing Company who spoke to their coding department. Our billing companies coding department stated: there may be some difficulty in billing these codes. It is her impression that these codes are only to be used for extenuating circumstances. She think that payers will deny them and request extensive back up. When billing E&M codes they are already time based so to add on a code like this really needs to be above and beyond. The billing company afraid of denials and send backs and where documentation will be kept.
My Practiced Manager and I discussed this and she asked for me to put some feelers out there see what other people may think? The copy of the documentations are here at our practice office also at each facility in patients medical files. I am unsure because no offense when I went through coding school they only go over about blimp of coding for nursing homes / boarding homes, and every site you go on its all about hospital and doctor offices. My sister codes for hospitals in another state and she was not sure. Also about 90% of our patients have Medicare, ( also have VA homes ). Our providers spend a lot of time with patients explaining treatments do to 70% have some type of Dementia, we are still on paper charts. Practice Manager almost agrees with the billing companies coding department as we been coding without is for years, I feel we should try is and see how it goes. This may help from many providers trying to code 99306, or 99310, just based on their time when the rest of the not really could be a 99304 -99305, or 99307-99309.
Sorry for the confusing note in short do you think codes 99354, 99355, 99356, 99357, would be good to use in our practice.
Would aspirate any help
Mel C
My Practiced Manager and I discussed this and she asked for me to put some feelers out there see what other people may think? The copy of the documentations are here at our practice office also at each facility in patients medical files. I am unsure because no offense when I went through coding school they only go over about blimp of coding for nursing homes / boarding homes, and every site you go on its all about hospital and doctor offices. My sister codes for hospitals in another state and she was not sure. Also about 90% of our patients have Medicare, ( also have VA homes ). Our providers spend a lot of time with patients explaining treatments do to 70% have some type of Dementia, we are still on paper charts. Practice Manager almost agrees with the billing companies coding department as we been coding without is for years, I feel we should try is and see how it goes. This may help from many providers trying to code 99306, or 99310, just based on their time when the rest of the not really could be a 99304 -99305, or 99307-99309.
Sorry for the confusing note in short do you think codes 99354, 99355, 99356, 99357, would be good to use in our practice.
Would aspirate any help
Mel C