What does that mean? Well. It means everything. And it means nothing. It is the enormous universe of numbered codes (CPT) that every physician must grasp in order to get paid for services provided. In order to remain a viable business, physicians must learn how to code. And they must learn how to code well so they aren’t accused of fraud.
The current coding system is ridiculously difficult and vague. So difficult and vague that audits by the Medicare National Bank (MNB) often result in multiple different opinions by the MNB auditors themselves.
Coding is a system of confusion. I am here to say the coding system is insane. Current coding rules are used by all third parties to determine the economic value of your care. To determine how much your encounter with the patient is worth. Ultimately, the coding system has become the most important aspect of a physician’s professional life because coding determines revenue. And revenue determines the viability of the business model. And that ultimately determines how much you take home to feed your family. Dr Kevin blogged about that here.
So let the games begin. The current coding rules are a futile attempt to bring rings of value to medical service. Services which are so vastly different and unique for every patient. I will attempt to walk you through an example of the payment system, and how it relates to relative value units (RVUs) and ultimately how that affects physician payment.
The number of codes is massive. For all imaginable procedures, encounters, surgeries. Any possible health care interaction. Hospitalist medicine is limited in the types of codes we use. So I only have to remember a few.
95% of my billing is based on about twenty CPT codes:
There are a few others, but these twenty-two codes determine my very financial existence. Medicare says so. Imagine a surgeon, a primary care doc, and a medical subspecialist. Every single interaction has a code. There are codes for codes, modifiers for codes, add on codes, disallowed codes, V codes, M codes. It seems as if the list is endless. And you have to get it right. Every time. Or you don’t get paid. Or you are accused of fraud. It is an impossible feat. The process of taking care of patients has turned into a game of documentation. And that has drastically affected the efficiency of the practice of medicine.
Let me walk you through a 99223, the code for the highest level admit for inpatient care. A level three. There is no actual law, as I understand it, on the Medicare books that definitely defines the requirement for these Evaluation and Management (E&M) codes. There are generally accepted guidelines which carriers are expected to follow. 1995 and 1997 guidelines. Even the guidelines from different years are different. And you are allowed to pick and chose from both. More silliness.
The following is my understanding of what Medicare requires in order to bill a level three admit, CPT code 99223. You must have every one of these components or it’s considered fraud, over-billing or waste. Pick your verbal poison.
1) History of Present Illness (HPI) : This requires four elements (character, onset, location, duration, what makes it better or worse, associated signs and symptoms) or the status of three chronic medical conditions.
2) Past Medical History (PMH): This requires a complete history of medical (medical problems, allergies, medications), family (what does your family suffer from), social (do you smoke or shoot up cocaine?) histories.
3) Review of Systems (ROS): A 12 point review of systems which asks you every possible question in the book. Separated by organ system.
4) Complete Physical Exam (PE): With components of all organ systems, the rules of which are highly complex in and of itself.
5) High Complexity Medical Decision-Making: This one is great. It is broken down into three areas and you must have 2 of 3 components as follows; Pull out your calculator.
5a) Diagnosis. Four points are required to get to high complexity. Each type of problem is defined by a point value (self limiting, established stable, established worsening, new problems with no work up planned and new problems with work up planned). You must know how many points each problem is worth. Count the number of problems. Add up the point value for each problem and you get your point value for Diagnosis (5a). You must have four points to be considered high complexity.
5b) Data. Four points are required for high complexity. Different data components are worth a different number of points. Data includes such things as reviewing or ordering lab, reviewing xrays or EKGs yourself, discussing things with other health care providers (which I have never been able to define), reviewing radiology or nuclear med studies, and obtaining old records etc. Each different data point documented (remember you have to write all this down too) is given a different point value. You must add up the points to determine your level of complexity. Get four points and you get high complexity for Data (5b).
5c) Concepts. I call this the basket. Predefined and sometimes vague medical processes that are defined as high risk. This includes such things as the need to closely monitor drug therapy for signs of toxicity ( I would include sliding scale insulin in this category), de-escalating care, progression or side effect of treatment, severe exacerbation with threat to life or limb, changes in neurological status, acute renal failure and cardiovascular imaging with identified risk factors. There are too many categories that are defined as a high risk concept. I cannot remember all of them. If you have a concept considered high risk, you get credit for high risk in the concepts category (5c)
Now remember, out of 5a, 5b, and 5c, you must meet high high complexity criteria on two out of three to be considered high risk. Did you remember to bring your calculator to work? And once you’ve calculated your high complexity category, don’t forget to write down all the components required from HPI, PMH, ROS, PE to not be accused of fraud.
Folks, this is what I have to document every time I admit a patient to the hospital in order to get paid and not be accused of fraud. This is what the government (and all other subsequent third party systems) have decided is necessary for me to treat you as a patient. This is what I must consider every time I take care of you.
I always find myself wondering if I wrote down that I personally reviewed that EKG. I wonder if I wrote down that your great great grand mother died of “heart problems”. I wonder if I remembered to write down all your pertinent positives on your review of systems and whether I documented the lack of positives in all other systems that were reviewed.
And remember each CPT code is given an RVU value, the value of which is determined by its own three components.
The work RVU
The practice expense RVU
The malpractice expense RVU
Then the MNB multiplies your total RVU (add the three components above) and attached a geographical multiplier (you get more RVUs in NYC than in Montana).
Then, they take that number of RVUs and they multiply it by the Congressional mandated value of the RVU (currently about $35/RVU). That value is currently determined by the political whims of politicians and is controlled by the irrational sustainable growth formula (SGR). That is the formula that is overturned every year because of the irrational economics it employs.
And that’s how a physician is paid. This is what determines whether physicians survive in the business of medicine. And whether they have enough money to pay the electric bill, the accountant’s fees and the matching contribution to their nurse’s 401K.
Oh yeah. I almost forgot, I have to do all this while actually taking care of your medical problems based on sound scientific principles.
This is coding in a nutshell. A 99223. This is what I think about when I’m admitting you through the emergency room. This is E&M medicine. This is Medicare medicine. This is how your government has decided the practice of medicine should be. To get paid, I must document what Medicare says I must in order to care for you, the patient. It doesn’t matter what I think is important to write in the chart. What matters is what is required to get paid and not be accused of fraud.
Like I have said before, the medical chart has become nothing more than a giant invoice for third parties to assert a sense of control on their balance sheet. It doesn’t matter who that third party is. They are all the same.. I’m telling you, it’s nothing more than a really inefficient game of cat and mouse. It is a terribly inefficient and expensive way to practice medicine.
And I might remind you, the exercise above was an example of just one patient on one day. I do this upwards of fifteen times a day. Every day. Day after day. Year after year. Oh yeah, and the rules are different for inpatient followup codes, discharge codes, critical care codes, and observation/admit same day codes. They all have their different requirements. And I have to get it right for every single patient I see. Every day. Over 2500 times a year. With the expectation of 100% accuracy.
Why? You see, in the eyes of Medicare, you are a nothing more than a 99223.
Beginning July 1st, eDocAmerica began offering eDoc services to Medicaid recipients and their families in Arkansas. Since there are about 800,000 Arkansas Medicaid recipients, when added to our previously covered clients, this program takes us a long way towards offering the benefit to the majority of Arkansans.
It is especially exciting to begin offering a cost effective health care benefit to this large, underserved population. eDoc services can help with so many of this patient population’s needs, including whether a child needs to be taken to see a doctor for acute care needs, to provide information that can help a patient determine if a second opinion needs to be sought for a given care situation, to provide information about medications that patients are on, to provide information to families of nursing home patients that they can use to ask intelligent questions about their family member’s care, and many others. For nursing home patients, we encourage family members to log on and ask our professionals questions about their family members anytime, for any reason.
It is a daunting task to effectively communicate the availability of this benefit to this group of patients. We’ll be working diligently over the coming weeks and months with the Arkansas Minority Affairs Commission, the Arkansas State Health Department, the Community Health Centers of Arkansas, Area Health Education Centers and Arkansas State government agents to increase awareness of this program and encourage its use.
One of the barriers to this program’s success is that many patients either won’t have a computer, or won’t have access to the internet. We have addressed this with a toll free number (877-581-3362) that Medicaid recipients can call to ask their question. Our call center is staffed by trained nursing personnel who will relay the message to the professional staff and then call the patient back after the answer has been posted.
In addition, we are finalizing an iPhone application that should be ready to go within a short time. We hope to use this new initiative to begin to address some of the health care disparities that exist in the state.
I hope that we will soon see the day that every single resident in our State, insured or not, will be able to log on ask one of our professionals a question that will, in some small way, improve their health!
*This blog post was originally published at eDocAmerica*
President Obama recently declared that, “We are not a nation that accepts nearly 46 million uninsured men, women, and children.” And indeed, finding a way to provide universal health coverage to every American is one of the focal points in today’s health care debate. There are a variety of ways we can achieve this, ranging from a Medicare for all, single payer system to requiring everyone to purchase health insurance. But no solution can work unless we first deal with the shortage of primary care doctors.
After all, what good is having health insurance if you can’t find a doctor to see you?
As a primary care physician in Nashua, New Hampshire, a city that borders the state of Massachusetts, I have had the luxury of closely observing that state’s health reform efforts. And to their credit, Massachusetts currently enjoys near-universal health coverage, in part because of the mandate requiring every resident to obtain health insurance. Many policy experts are predicting that a national plan will closely emulate the Massachusetts model, so it’s worth noting any potential consequences.
Since reform began in 2006, the Massachusetts health care system has been inundated with almost half a million new, previously uninsured, patients, and the demand for medical services has rapidly outpaced physician supply. The wait to see a new primary care doctor is almost 2 months, leading patients to use the emergency room more often for routine visits. In fact, since the universal coverage law was passed, Massachusetts emergency rooms have reported a 7 percent increase in volume, which markedly inflates costs when you consider that treating simple conditions in the ER can be exponentially more expensive than an office visit. It’s no wonder that the plan has placed significant fiscal strain on the state’s budget, which is struggling to contain soaring health spending.
This affects hospitals like Boston Medical Center, which primarily serves the city’s poor. The state’s mandatory health insurance law is causing the medical center, according to a front page story in last Sunday’s Boston Globe, to brace “for dramatic financial losses, which some fear will force it to slash programs and jeopardize care for thousands of poverty-stricken families.”
Furthermore, consider the words of family physician Kate Atkinson, who practices in Amherst, Massachusetts. She had decided to temporarily accept new patients, as 18 doctors in her area had recently closed their practices or moved away.
“There were so many people waiting to get in, it was like opening the floodgates,” she says. “Most of these patients hadn’t seen the doctor in a long time so they had a lot of complicated problems. We literally have 10 calls a day from patients crying and begging.”
She closed her practice to new patients 6 weeks later.
I witness this phenomenon myself every day, with patients from Massachusetts routinely crossing the border to New Hampshire looking for a new primary care doctor. These are people with chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, depression, and high blood pressure – all who need a regular physician to follow them.
And keep in mind that Massachusetts has the highest density of doctors per capita in the country. What do you think will happen to states that do not have a comparable supply of physicians?
Moving away from Massachusetts, let’s look at two other examples where universal coverage was promised before ensuring adequate primary care access. One would be our military veterans, who are guaranteed health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs, also known as the VA. Earlier this decade, the wait to see a primary care doctor in the VA routinely exceeded 50 days in various parts of the country. Although that number has improved, a recent report by the Office of the Inspector General concluded that more than a third of veterans still waited a month or more to see a doctor. And with tens of thousands returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan straining an already overburdened VA health system, it’s no wonder that my practice in Nashua, New Hampshire sees a fair amount of veterans who are unable to obtain timely care from their local VA clinic up north in Manchester, or from down in Boston.
Next, consider the care Native Americans receive via the Indian Health Service. Despite having guaranteed health care coverage, President Obama himself cites Indian reservations in South Dakota that have some of the lowest life expectancies in the Western Hemisphere. American Indians are twice as likely to die from diabetes when compared to whites, 60 percent more likely to have a stroke, 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease. Although each of these conditions can be treated or prevented with timely primary care, according to a 2005 Government Accountability Office report, patient waits within the Indian Health Service for routine women’s care and general physicals lasted anywhere between two and six months.
It is encouraging that the President and members of Congress recognize the threat that the primary care shortage poses to their health reform efforts. But some of the solutions being discussed, such as reducing medical school debt, increasing funding to the National Health Service Corps, and training more mid-level providers like nurse practitioners and physician assistants, fall woefully short. None will have any immediate impact, which will be especially critical if there’s a distinct possibility that already overwhelmed primary care doctors will be responsible for almost 50 million additional, newly insured, patients overnight.
Instead, we need to value primary care, and make it central to our health system. Rather than being encouraged to squeeze in appointments and rush through office visits, doctors need to be incentivized to practice patient-focused primary care, including, managing chronic diseases, providing preventive medicine guidance, and taking the time to counsel patients.
There’s no question that we need to find a way to provide health coverage for every American. But we must do so in a responsible manner, and that starts with ensuring that we have a strong primary care system first.
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
Dr. Alan Dappen, Dr. Steve Simmons, and nurse practitioner Valerie Tinley are regular contributors to the Better Health blog. I’m a big fan of their innovative medical practice, and decided to follow them during one of their work days as they deliver affordable, quality healthcare to patients in Virginia.
This is how primary care used to be… and a model that deserves more attention.
My mother-in-law just had a CT scan of her head in the Emergency Department of her local hospital. My husband called me to ask if I could “talk to her about her headache.”
Severe headaches in the elderly are indeed worrisome, and I wondered if she had fallen recently – if she might have a bleed in her brain requiring immediate surgery. Of course, she’d need a CT scan to rule that out… I was prepared for the worst. But what I learned by simply talking to Mrs. Zlotkus was unexpectedly revealing – not only about her diagnosis but about our healthcare system in general.
As it turns out, Mrs. Zlotkus had been having severe headaches for about 3 months. She was taking Vicodin daily to “take the edge off.” When I asked her about the location of the pain, she said that it was “just on one side of my head, from the top of my neck to the top of my head.” I asked her if the pain sometimes traveled to the other side, or if it involved her eye. “Never,” was her quick response. She also told me that she’d been seeing a physical therapist for 2.5 months for neck stretching exercises.
Mrs. Zlotkus told me her CT scan was negative, and that her blood tests didn’t show any “temporary arthritis.” (That’s temporal arteritis, I presume.)
“Well,” I said, “There’s only one thing left that I can think of that will give you a headache in the exact area you’re describing – and that’s shingles. Did you notice any scabs or painful bumps on your scalp when the headaches first started?”
“Why, yes!” Said Mrs. Zlotkus. “About 3 months ago I noticed some very painful, crusty scabs on my scalp. I thought for sure it was because my hairdresser used extra strong chemicals on my hair. I scolded her for it. She told me to put tea tree oil on it.”
Oh, boy. There it was – a diagnosis as plain as the nose on her face.
“Um… Well did you tell the ER docs about the scabs?”
“No. They never asked me about it and I didn’t see what my hairdresser’s chemical burn had to do with my severe headaches.”
My mother-in-law’s work up (ER visit, CT scan, several doctor visits, pain medicines), misdiagnosis (neck muscle stiffness), and mistreatment (physical therapy) for shingles probably cost upwards of $10,000. Worse than that, she did not get anti-viral treatment early enough in her outbreak to prevent a long-lasting pain syndrome (called post-herpetic neuralgia). Now that she has this shingles-related headache, it’s very hard to treat. And taking lots of acetaminophen-rich medications (Vicodin) is the last thing her liver needs right now.
So how did the healthcare system fail Mrs. Zlotkus? In my opinion, this is a great example of the “failure of synthesis” that Evan Falchuk discusses on his See First blog. Somehow, the physicians involved in Mrs. Zlotkus’ care didn’t take the time to think about her symptoms, to ask the right questions, and to put all the puzzle pieces together. Instead, they just ruled out the potential emergency issues (a stroke/hemorrhage, or temporal arteritis) and gave her a follow up appointment with a neurologist (who couldn’t fit her in their schedule for 2 months). They didn’t take a full history – they just dumped her in the most likely diagnostic category (neck stiffness) and let some other specialist follow up. Shameful.
Sometimes I feel as if I have to keep an eye on all my friends and family before they set foot in a hospital, ER, or doctor’s office. I’m afraid that those providing their care will be so rushed and thoughtless that my loved ones will wind up with a huge bill, the wrong diagnosis, and perhaps even a near-death experience. I am seriously afraid for them.
The bottom line is that we have to stop rewarding providers for volume over quality. We have to value the history and physical exam beyond the CT scan and lab tests. We have to give doctors the chance to think about their patients – rather than turn up the speed dial on the clinical treadmills as a means to reduce costs.
My mother-in-law just spent $10,000 of our tax dollars on a diagnosis that could be made in 5 minutes of thoughtful questioning over the telephone. Multiply that cost by the number of other Medicare beneficiaries who are suffering similar misdiagnoses in this country and we’re talking serious money.
Under-thinking leads to over-testing. Has the CBO taken that into consideration in its scoring of various reform plans? I don’t think so. To me, this is yet another reason why we need physicians at the table in healthcare reform – we see the real cost drivers that others might not think of – even if some of us are too busy to diagnose shingles correctly!
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