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November 2013When performing office-based surgery to correct inferior turbinate hypertrophy (ITH), success doesn’t just depend on clinical outcomes. Getting adequately reimbursed for these procedures to maintain a financially stable practice is also key, and the way to accomplish that is to brush up on your knowledge of Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes. So here are a few tips for ensuring proper coding of procedures and maximizing reimbursement.
1 Match the correct procedure with the correct CPT code. “In concept, at least, this is very simple: If you don’t assign the right CPT code to the right procedure, your payment claim is going to be denied,” said Dr. Setzen. “But the devil is in the details.” He noted, for example, that “if you remove the soft tissue of the turbinate via the submucosal approach, use CPT code 30140, no matter what method you use,” he said. “You can use a microdebrider, or you can simply resect tissue with any instrumentation, provided this is done submucosally.”