Correct Medical Billing for Family Meetings

If you have a meeting with the family members of an assisted living facility patient (patient was not present) to discuss any aspect of the individual’s healthy status, such as memory loss or personality changes, you can bill Medicare but this scenario would not qualify for CPO (Care Plan Oversight) services.

Instead this would fall under the realm of code range 99324-99337,(Domiciliary or rest home visit for the evaluation and management of a … patient).

By the way, when you do report CPO services for a private-pay assisted living facility patient in the near future, you would assign new 2007 codes 99339-99340 (Individual physician supervision of a patient [patient not present] in home, domiciliary or rest home [e.g., assisted living facility] requiring complex and multidisciplinary care modalities…), not 99374-99375 (Physician supervision of a patient under care of home health agency [patient not present] in home, domiciliary or equivalent environment …).

Keeping up with the lightening fast changes in the medical billing industry is hard enough without having to keep up with the never-ending coding changes that can affect your reimbursements or get your medical billing claim outright denied. Make sure your staff stays up to date on the best codings to use for your services rendered and if it is too much to keep up with, consider outsourcing your medical billing to the pros that not only make it their business to keep up with the changes that have been made, they can also give your practice a head’s up on the changes that are coming that will directly affect your reimbursements.

View all Articles by: Melissa Clark, CCS-P