Per CPT guidelines, you may only report one “initial” vaccine administration code per day, regardless of the route of administration. Simple, straightforward, and easy to understand…right? 

The micro lab has numerous “add on” procedures that are routinely performed to complete the culture report. Frequently, add on charges are never captured. There are several reasons for this – some process driven (such as bill drop dates coming too soon for the completion of all testing) and human errors (not submitting charges in a timely manner). One BIG reason is simply because bacteria do not grow at the whim of human time lines.

 The number of active NCCI edits increased significantly this year.

We saw a near doubling of physician edits last quarter, with hospital CCI edits quickly converging to match the physician version.

If you have updateable NCCI tools, that means you are going to see many more codes involved in edits.  If you rely solely on paper-based updates published yearly, the content that hit the presses last fall will be remarkably inaccurate for the 2nd half of 2009.

We've noticed that the NCCI code pairs in the physician version for 04/01/2009 have nearly doubled this quarter!  For this and other customer requests, we held a webinar today on NCCI and MUE.  Check the What's New in the product for the Study Aid in the MediNotes collection.  There you will also find a copy of the presentation slides.  Comment to this posting if you have any follow up questions, want to make comments, or wish to start a deeper dialogue about NCCI Issues!

In the past, the Outpatient Code Editor (OCE) has not applied the NCCI edits for the following categories of services: anesthesiology, evaluation and management, and mental health services. Effective 1/1/09, these categorical exclusions will be removed and there will be a large number of new institutional (hospital) NCCI edits applied to claims.