As you gear up to step into the New Year, you should start easing your practice into the CPT 2011 changes that’ll be in effect on the first day of the year. Begin your preparations with this preview of some of the new and revised descriptors that may have an impact on your cardiology coding.

Gear up for cardiac cath coding overhaul

CPT 2011 brings major code changes for cardiac catheterization codes. One aspect of that change is that many of the new injection codes appear to be add-on codes. It’ll be interesting to see what the fee schedule has allowed for these services to really get a hang of how it’ll affect the cardiology practices in the coming year.

We will go into more details on the correct use of the new codes once the AMA has released details; however you can get a hint of what’s to come by looking at the new injection procedure codes. Note that these codes include both (1) the injection procedure during cardiac cath and (2) imaging supervision, interpretation, and report:

93563 93564 93565 93566 93567 93568 Deletion alert: As a result of these additions, reports indicate that CPT 2011 will delete 2010 codes 93539-93545 and 93555-93556. Rely on more to come for coronary angiography options You may also think why the just-in injection procedure codes for coronary angiography (93563-93564) specify “congenital heart catheterization”. It appears you will have other options for non-congenital cases. This is because another one of the major changes you can expect is the addition of a new, eight-code family, 93454-93461. The codes in the family differ based on whether you are reporting additional imaging or heart catheterization services carried out at the same session. For other cardiac cath codes and the entire CPT code list, sign up for a medical coding guide like Supercoder!