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It is necessary for most users of the CPT code (principally providers of services) to pay license fees for access to the code. [19] In the past, AMA offered a limited search of the CPT manual for personal, non-commercial use on its web site. [20] CPT codes can be looked up on the AAPC (American Academy of Professional Coders) website. [21]
This allows medical service providers to document and bill for reimbursement for services provided. E/M codes are based on the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes established by the American Medical Association (AMA). In 2010, new codes were added to the E/M Coding set, for prolonged services without direct face-to-face contact. [4]
The CPT Committee issues new codes twice each year. A separate committee, the Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC), [ 7 ] meets three times a year to set new values, [ 8 ] determines the Relative Value Units (RVUs) for each new code, and revalues all existing codes at least once every five years.
Medical billing, a payment process in the United States healthcare system, is the process of reviewing a patient's medical records and using information about their diagnoses and procedures to determine which services are billable and to whom they are billed.
In the United States, the chargemaster, also known as charge master, or charge description master (CDM), is a comprehensive listing of items billable to a hospital patient or a patient's health insurance provider. In practice, it usually contains highly inflated prices at several times that of actual costs to the hospital.
The system is also referred to as "the DRGs", and its intent was to identify the "products" that a hospital provides. One example of a "product" is an appendectomy. The system was developed in anticipation of convincing Congress to use it for reimbursement, to replace "cost based" reimbursement that had been used up to that point.
The various providers within an ACO work to provide coordinated care, align incentives and lower costs. ACOs are different from health maintenance organizations (HMOs) in that they allow providers much freedom in developing the ACO infrastructure. [31] Any provider or provider organization may assume the role of running an ACO.
Providers may seek to maximize profit by avoiding patients for whom reimbursement may be inadequate (e.g., patients who do not take their drugs as prescribed), by overstating the severity of an illness, by giving the lowest level of service possible, by not diagnosing complications of a treatment before the end date of the bundled payment, or ...