Medicare Consultation 2010 Codes - Coding Life Is Easy Now
There has been much confusion about consultations in general
. The deletion of consultation codes will now make your coding life easier because it eliminates the constant arguments of what is and is not a consult. Now you will no longer have to determine which consultation coding advice to follow or scour your physicians documentation for the three Rs of consultations: request, rendering of services and return of the patient to the requesting physician.
The change will put an end to the confusion for consult versus transfer of care, thus making the coders and auditors lives much easier. Now, for these services, instead of reporting consultation codes, you would need to report new or established patient office visit or hospital care (E/M) codes for these services, and CMS would boost payments for the existing E/M codes.
In order to make up for the elimination of the consultation codes, CMS will allow more than one initial hospital visit or nursing home visit.
But heres what you need to watch out for: Although this is a budget-neutral proposal, the net effect will shift some dollars from specialists to internists. CMS was on the lookout for a method to do this for some time now.
If you want to know how the deletion of consult codes is going to affect your practice apart from lapping up all the information pertaining to Medicare 2010 consultation codes, there are various sources of information that you can turn to. But the best choice would be to sign up for a one-stop medical coding website and get all the updates on consultation codes under one roof.