Coding Course: What you don’t know can cost you money

Jun 30, 2020 Re-posted from the July 2020 issue of Vascular Specialist

BY BETH BALES

Don’t leave reimbursement money on the table. Plan to attend—or have a staff member or two attend—the 2020 Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) Coding and Reimbursement Workshop. This year’s workshop, with an optional session on evaluation and management (EM) codes, will be held Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26, at the Hyatt Rosemont in Rosemont, Illinois, near O’Hare International Airport.

The optional session will be from 8 a.m. to noon Sept. 25, with the main workshop set for 1 to 5 p.m. Sept. 25 and from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sept. 26.

The intensive program is designed to address updates, including changes to endovascular stent placement outside the lower extremity and PQRS, as well as coding for intravascular embolization and retrograde intrathoracic carotid stenting.

Vascular surgery is a complex specialty, requiring a large number of codes, plus has seen a great many code changes in the past five-plus years, according to faculty members.

The optional workshop will focus on coding and documentation rules for choosing a correct EM category and level of service specifically for the vascular surgeon. Because this is still a significant area of audits for payors, both Medicare and CPT have proposed major changes to the way EM codes are reported and paid, which could impact reimbursement negatively, course managers have said.

An attendee from 2019 explains why the course is valuable. “I am a vascular surgeon who now is required to enter my own codes into a hospital billing/coding app and need to know the codes. My RVUs (relative value units) are also based on this so I want them to be accurate, so as to optimize my RVUs to be recognized for the enormous amount of work a vascular surgeon does during the day. And it is never an eight-hour day. Ever. Seven days a week.” Visit vsweb.org/Coding2020 for more information.

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