New HCPCS Medical Billing Tool

Your practice should know where to look for medical billing changes each year. When dealing with HCPCS consolidated billing, many billers become confused about what codes are excluded from this type of billing. Before allowing your staff members to do medical billing, be sure they know where to look for answers to their coding questions.

The source to find consolidated HCPCS medical billing codes is no longer in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Skilled Nursing Facility Help File. Since September 25, 2005, CMS has tried to steer medical billing staff members away from this file. Now, however, it is more important to do so.

A new website has been created specifically for consolidated medical billing updates. The web address is www.cms.hhs.gov/providers/snf.pps/snffi/. This is where individuals can find the 2006 Annual and quarterly updates as well. This website will be kept more current and up to date than the old CMS Skilled Nursing Facility Help File. Your medical billing department can even print off the files in an Excel or PDF format. CMS wants the medical billing HCPCS codes to be used correctly, so they wanted the best resource as possible for reference.

When training your medical billing staff members, knowledge retention and memorization is not always the most important element. If you don’t know the answer to a problem or question, sometimes the best knowledge is knowing where to find that information. You will never know the answer to every medical billing question, but you should always know where to find the answer.

Be sure your medical billing staff use all available resources before they submit claims to payers. Accurate claims mean correct and timely reimbursement for your services. The introduction of the new HCPCS website makes accuracy in medical billing easier to obtain.

View all Articles by: Melissa Clark, CCS-P