The Cohen Report: Medicare Part B NCCI Update 16.2 for Providers Effective July 1, 2010

Here’s your pop quiz:

The NCCI edits are:

A.  pairs of services that should not be billed by the same physician for the same patient on the same day.

B.  definition refinements for HCPCS codes.

C.  diagnosis codes (ICD-9) that cannot be billed together on a CMS 1500 claim.

The answer is below the picture.

Doctor's Office (Tools of The Trade)

Image by sxyblkmn via Flickr

If you answered “A”, you’re on top of your game!  The King of the National Correct Coding Initiative (NCCI) quarterly analysis is Mr. Frank Cohen and he provides that analysis free of charge for all.  Thank you, Frank!  With his analysis, you have the opportunity to see what’s changed and what’s new, to tweak your system to catch the pairs, and to make sure you are providing the right care at the right time as well as maximizing your reimbursement.

The Cohen Report:

In summary, there are 16,843 new edit pairs, bringing the total number of active edit pairs to 653,718. Six of these are backdated to an effective date of January 1, 2010. The majority of these (75.17%)  are associated to the edit policy “Misuse of column two code with column one code” with 12.82% associated to “Standard preparation / monitoring services for anesthesia”. There are 6,042 unique Column 1 codes and 274 unique Column 2 Codes within the new edits.

There are 36 new terminated edit pairs with 12 backdated to January 1, 2010 and two backdated to April 1, 2010. The edit policies associated to these edit pairs are distributed between “Misuse of column two code with column one code” (44.4%), “CPT Manual and CMS coding manual instructions” (33.3%) and “More extensive procedure” (22.2%).
There were 413 edit pairs with modifier changes. Of these, 387 went from 0 (no modifier permitted) to 1 (modifier permitted) and 26 went from an indicator of 0 to an indicator of 1.
There are currently 1,336 duplicate entries; codes that were activated at one point then terminated and then re-activated. There are 5,318 swapped edit pairs; situations where the edit pair was introduced at one point in a specific order (column 1 and column 2), terminated and then re-activated with the edit pair in the opposite order.

I have posted my analysis worksheets for those interested in the details. Go to www.frankcohen.com and click on the Download tab.

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