tci Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement - 2008 Issue 23

Reader Question: Zoom In On 'Targets' Before Coding Moderate Sedation

Hint: You can't always bill moderate sedation separately Question: An established patient complaining of rectal pain and abdominal cramps reports to our surgeon. During a level-four E/M service, the surgeon discovers a foreign body (FB) in the colon. The surgeon then removes the FB via flexible sigmoidoscopy. Due to the patient's anxiety and pain, the surgeon provides 26 minutes of moderate sedation during the procedure. Can we report the sedation separately? Answer: You cannot report moderate sedation separately in this case. CPT bundles moderate sedation into all of the sigmoidoscopy codes, so your claim cannot include 99144 (Moderate sedation...

To read the full article, sign in and subscribe to tci Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement.


Keep pace with evolving Medicare regulations — and onboard your team — with timely analysis of critical updates interpreted in an easy-to-follow, easy-to-apply format. Your subscription to TCI's Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement Alert will equip you to navigate code and guideline changes, CCI edits, and revisions to modifiers, payer policies, the fee schedule, OIG target areas, and more.

  • Current newsletters added each month
  • Fully searchable archives - over 4200 articles
  • ALL years/issues back to 2003 organized by year and issue
  • Codes mentioned in articles are linked to Code Information pages
  • Code Information pages link back to related articles
Access to this feature is available in the following products:
  • tci Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement +Archives

demo
request yours today
 subscribe
start today
 newsletter
free subscription

Thank you for choosing Find-A-Code, please Sign In to remove ads.