Improving Your Outpatient Revenue: The CPT Codes You Forgot To Bill

In my last post, I lamented that Medicare billing will earn me $614 per hour reading pulmonary function tests but only $107 per hour in outpatient clinical practice. We all have the impression that outpatient medicine does not pay very well. But there are some ways to improve your outpatient billing by making sure that you bill all of the CPT codes that you can legitimately bill for. Here are 8 CPT codes along with the Medicare reimbursable amounts that you can bill in addition to your regular evaluation and management CPT codes that will enhance your outpatient revenue:

1. 99497 – Advanced Care Planning 30 Minutes (2.39 RVUs; $86). You can bill this code when you are having face-to-face discussions about hospice and DNR status with the patient, family members, or surrogate. Time must be documented to be between 16-45 minutes. There is no limit to the number of times this can be billed in a given year. If you spend more than 45 minutes, then you can also bill CPT code 99498 for each additional 30 minutes of face-to-face discussion. I see a lot of patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an ultimately fatal disease, and end-of-life discussions are common and always take >16 minutes so this is a useful code.
2. 99358 – Prolonged Service Without Patient Contact (3.16 RVUs; $114). You can bill this code for reviewing patient records before or after an office visit with a patient. For example, if you are seeing a new patient with extensive medical records and documentation. Time must be documented and you have to have at least 31 minutes spend reviewing material to bill this code. Bill this code on the day that you review all of the records. Not only does it pay reasonably well, it can make you more efficient – by pre-reviewing all of the old records before the start of your office hours, you can spend more time actually seeing patients so that your office staff are not sitting around waiting for you to review records before putting the next patient in a room. Code 99358 is for 31-74 minutes of record review. If you spend 75-104 minutes, you can additionally bill 9359 (1.52 RVUs). Many of my patients come to me with multiple CT scans that require review of the various images, pulmonary function tests that require interpretation, lots of lab test, cardiovascular tests, hospitalization records, and outpatient notes from the referring physician. It is surprisingly easy to spend >31 minutes sorting through all of the records, doing my own interpretation of the CT images and PFTs, and documenting all of these findings in our electronic medical record.
3. 99406 – Smoking Cessation Counseling 3-10 Minutes (0.41 RVUs; $15). Few things that we do in medicine can have as great of an impact on our patient’s health than getting them to quit smoking, and Medicare will pay us to do it! You can bill this in addition to your regular evaluation and management CPT code. You need to document what you discussed and the number of minutes (I use a “smartphrase” in our Epic electronic medical record). If you spend more than 10 minutes, then you can bill CPT code 99407 (0.79 RVUs). Be sure to add a -25 modifier to indicate that the smoking cessation counseling was done in addition to your regular evaluation and management service that day. Although this CPT code does not pay very much, we almost always spend at least 3 minutes talking to the patient when we are counseling about smoking cessation so this is one of the codes I bill frequently.
4. 94664 – Inhaler Technique Training (0.49 RVUs; $18). I once read a study that found that 50% of patients use their inhalers incorrectly. This code pays us to do the right thing and ensure that all patients are using the proper technique with their inhalers. There are so many new inhaler devices on the market now that just knowing how to use one device does not necessarily mean that the patient will know how to use another device. We do not keep samples in our office except for inhalers which we keep purely for the purpose of teaching our patients when prescribing a new inhaler. Make sure you document that inhaler technique training was performed (another smartphrase). Interestingly, this CPT code is composed of a practice expense RVU and a malpractice RVU but it has no work RVU associated with it. That is because you (the physician) should not be doing the inhaler training – it should be your nurses who do this. Many pharmaceutical companies will provide demonstration inhalers that do not contain any medication – I find these less satisfactory because the patients need to know the feel and taste of the medication when it is delivered with proper technique. I bill this CPT code every time I start a patient on a new inhaler.
5. 90460 – Intramuscular Injection (0.58 RVUs; $21). This is billed in addition to the CPT code for any vaccine that you administer in the office. In other words, there is one code for the actual vaccine and one code for the injection. I often see physicians only bill the code for the vaccine and so they are leaving a lot of money on the table. If you give 2 vaccines to the same patient during one office visit, use CPT code 90461 for the second injection (0.36 RVUs). We have this CPT code bundled in with common vaccinations (influenza, 23-valent pneumovax, Prevnar-13, etc.) so that it comes up anytime I order the vaccine.
6. 99490 – Chronic Care Management 20 Minutes (1.19 RVUs; $43). Use this code when you or your staff spend at least 20 minutes per month managing patients with chronic illness when they are not in the office (paperwork, emails, phone calls, etc.). I confess: I’ve never actually billed this code because I never remember to document my time for all of the things that I do to take care of patients and the requirements are just to onerous. However, every practice has a handful of patients who occupy a disproportionately large amount of your staff’s time and your time (think about the patient who calls your office twice a week, every week). Here are the requirements:
   • Patients have to have 2 or more chronic conditions that you manage.
   • The chronic conditions are expected to last for at least 12 months or until death.
   • There is a reasonable probability of death/decompensation/exacerbation/decline if the chronic conditions are not actively managed.
   • The patient has to agree to a chronic care management plan with you (probably safest to get this signed in case of an audit but at the very least, document your conversation with the patient to this effect in the patient’s chart).
   • You (or your office staff) have to document a total of 20 minutes per month doing things like coordinating home health care, filling out various forms related to the patient and their chronic condition, phone calls with the patient, emails to the patient (preferably via your electronic medical record for HIPPA compliance), etc. That means that every time you have a phone call with that patient, you have to document the number of minutes you spent on the phone and then documenting the discussion and your staff have to document the number of minutes they spent filling out the patients FMLA forms.
   • Only one physician (or NP or PA) can bill this code for any given patient on any given month.
   • You can bill this code once each month
   • You have to adhere to the CMS scope of service for this particular CPT code including:
     • Care management including medication management and management of the patient’s medical, psychosocial, and functional needs
     • Access to care management services 24-hours a day
     • Continuity of care
     • Creation of a patient-centered care plan that is documented in writing or in the electronic medical record
     • Management of care transitions (e.g. admission to a SNF)
     • Coordination with home-based services such as home healthcare and hospice
     • Multiple ways for the patient or their care giver to contact the physician and/or the office staff (e.g. phone, electronic medical record, email)
     • Use of a certified electronic medical record that is available 24-hours a day to any physicians (or NPs or PAs) that provide cross-coverage
7. 99495 – Transition Care Management Moderate Complexity (4.64 RVUs; $167) and 99496 – Transition Care Management High Complexity (6.55 RVUs; $236). The nurse practitioner who I work with oversees our pulmonary transition clinic that has been incredibly successful at reducing our hospital’s 30-day readmission rate for COPD. CPT codes 99495 & 99496 are perfect codes to cover this service. To meet the requirements of this code, there has to be contact with the patient within 2 days of discharge from the hospital (this can be by phone from your office nursing staff) and there has to be a face-to-face visit with the physician (or NP or PA) within 14 days of discharge from the hospital (7 days for 99496). The reason that these CPT codes are associated with a high RVU value is that the first office visit after discharge from the hospital is bundled into it. That first face-to-face visit is not billed separately and is included in the CPT code but any additional office visits in the 30 days after discharge can be billed separately. The transitional care can involve things like reviewing the discharge summary, following up on any pending test results, arranging follow-up testing, medication reconciliation, etc.
8. 99354 – Prolonged Services (3.69 RVUs; $133). Use this CPT code when you spend an excessively long amount of time with an office visit. I find this code particularly useful when I am seeing a patient for the first that one of my partners has previously seen within the past 3 years (thus prohibiting me from billing that patient as a new patient visit and forcing me to use the return patient visit codes instead). The time associated with this code is 1-hour but that translates to 31-74 minutes in CMS language. Importantly, that is on top of the time it would take for a regular evaluation and management code. So, for example, if you are billing for a level 5 return visit (defined as 40 minutes by Medicare), then you have to spend at least 70 minutes with that encounter and then you would bill both the level 5 return visit CPT code plus the prolonged services CPT code.

Outpatient practice can be challenging because there is a lot of time outside of the patient’s actual office visit that is required to care for the patient. Using these codes will not make you rich but they can at least partially pay for all of the non-compensated time that you have been providing in order to manage your outpatients.

October 13, 2018