Getting Your Medical Billing For Soft Tissue FBR Right

Foreign body removal (FBR) is a very common procedure that emergency department physicians wind up performing on a regular basis. However this particular procedure causes a lot of confusion in the medical billing department. To insure that maximum reimbursements are met, you need to know how to code it accurately.

The reporting of soft tissue FBRs will involve more than one choice in which code to use on the superform and knowing exactly what makes and FBR an FBR procedure will help you narrow down exactly which code to use to avoid unnecessary delays in payment or rejections.

The confusion often arises when coders look at the notes from the physician and are unable to ascertain exactly if it was an FBR procedure and if it was; what type of FBR took place with the patient. To determine what type of FBR the procedure was, you can ask these questions:

* the complexity of the removal

* whether the physician performed an incision during the procedure

* the anatomical location of the removal.

These three decision makers will tell the medical biller which code set to choose and will result in the maximum reimbursement in your medical billing claims. Otherwise you may wind up only getting a partial payment or worse, a rejection by the carrier for not showing enough documentation to back up the use of the FBR codes on the medical billing.

View all Articles by: Melissa Clark, CCS-P