ASC Coding And Billing: Knowing What’s Important

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The basics of ASC Coding And Billing aren’t hard to master, but they do differ from physician and facility requirements. The following overview will help you know what’s most important in the ASC setting. ASCs use a combination of hospital and physician billing. Although ASCs use CPT and HCPCS Level II codes to bill most of their services (as do physicians), some payers will allow an ASC to bill ICD-10-CM procedure codes (like a hospital). Some payers even base implant reimbursement on revenue code classification.

One of the most fundamental differences between billing for professional services and billing for ambulatory surgery center services is the concept of the global surgical package. The global package applies to the professional component of a surgical service that is performed when using a surgical CPT code. On the professional side, this typically encompasses a 90-day follow-up. In the ASC billing methodology, no such surgical package exists.

Therefore, each time a patient enters the operating room represents a unique and separate encounter and has no historical economic relationship to previous encounters. This is a very important difference and very often leads to the need for qualifying modifiers. Those modifiers tend to clarify a situation such as returning to the operating room on the same day or returning to the operating room by another doctor on a different date.