Sean McSweeney, founder and president of Apache Health, a Los-Angeles based medical billing company, told Becker's ASC Review his top five tips for spine coding.
1. Understand add-on codes and how they work.
2. Know the importance of modifiers and the correct use of them.
3. Always bill the main procedure codes per the highest reimbursement according to your carrier contract first, as some contracts do not follow the resource-based relative value units.
4. Understand the specific description of major procedures codes to determine [which is] most accurate, as many codes have similar descriptions and only differ by a few words.
5. Keep track of insurance carrier guidelines to understand each specific requirement, as many policies today simply will not cover certain spine codes.