I'm writing an article to discuss the power of key word searching to find codes, rather than looking in a book or trusting a code-range search, and the Mammography codes are a great example.  The key word search in our Code Explorer tool for the term mammogra* finds all Mammogram and Mammography codes.  Scrolling down makes it easy to see which codes are used for measurement reporting, which codes are payable, and you can even see the payment rate, adjusted to your locality or provider!

November Update: HCPCS and BETOS updates have been included in the HCPCS & CPT Pre-release Codebook! Check daily e-mail updates for the changes report, the download center for a much easier to use HCPCS data file than the one CMS publishes, and the bottom of the codebook for a series of very helpful index files.

It has been a few months since Medicare officially announced they would no longer allow payment for the inpatient (99251-99255) or outpatient (99241-99245) consultation codes. The works RVUs for the consultation codes have been distributed to increase the work RVUs for the new and established outpatient, initial hospital and initial nursing facility visit codes.

CMS recently released the Physician Fee Schedule code set update in conjunction with the Physician Fee Schedule Final rule, which was published in the Federal Register on November 19, 2008. This code set update becomes effective January 1, 2009.

This code set update includes several new surgical laparoscopy procedures (49652-49657) and stereotactic radiosurgery procedures (61796-61800) and modified skin debridement and benign lesion excision procedures with updated payment rates and RVU values (11004-11012 and 11404, 11406, 11420-11426, respectively).