What Codes Are Used For Outpatient Coding

1. What Codes Are Used For Outpatient Coding?

2. When you own a small medical practice, you know all about the fine line you have to balance between providing quality patient care while also staying on top of your medical coding and billing—not to mention adhering to all the inpatient and outpatient coding guidelines. • Whether it’s for securing the right amount of reimbursement for your medical services rendered or simply ensuring your patients’ diagnoses are properly documented, your medical coders play a major part in the overall stability of your medical practice.

3. As a result, your medical billing team must always be aware of the official coding guidelines for both inpatient coding and in an outpatient setting. • This can be a fairly convoluted experience without the time and resources available to larger practices, so we’ll be breaking down all you need to know about outpatient medical coding within this article.

4. Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) Codes • First on our list, we have CPT codes. These are fairly integral codes for following outpatient and inpatient coding guidelines and are ultimately used for describing things like medical procedures, services, and tests, too. • Let’s take a look at the three main categories CPT codes are organized into:

5. Evaluation and Management (E/M) Codes • E/M codes are primarily used for describing patient encounters—think of things such as office visits, consultations, and even hospital follow-ups. • Basically, they take into account factors like the complexity of their medical history and the level of physical examination provided.

6. Procedure Codes • These are slightly different as they refer to medical interventions instead. For example, surgeries, diagnostic tests, and therapeutic procedures, too. Each one of these procedures is then assigned a specific CPT code, which essentially allows for accurate billing.

7. Ancillary Service Codes • Lastly, ancillary service codes are used for things such as laboratory tests and radiology services, which help categorize all the different tests used to diagnose and treat a patient. • To read our full blog, click here: https://pmninc.biz/what-codes-are-used-for-outpatient-coding/