New Year, New Radiology Billing Changes

It is finally 2016! New years are always marked by the idea of change. Most of the time, we take these changes upon ourselves, but this year, radiology billing is bringing some massive changes to providers.

Radiology billing seems to be changing all the time these days, but let’s take a look at some of the past and future changes and talk about how it could be helpful for you to outsource your medical billing.

Billing Changes From 2015

Billing, in general, faced a major change in October 2015, when the new ICD-10 codes were implemented. Hundreds of radiology codes were deleted, changed, added, and/or modified. Without proper education on the new codes, practices likely experienced difficulty in their billing department in regards to reimbursements and denials.

(More on radiology and ICD-10)

Additionally, many frequently used radiology codes were bundled together and more specific codes were created to better define certain diagnoses and procedures. Among the sections of radiology affected, diagnostic and interventional radiology had the greatest changes.

The 2016 Radiology Billing Changes

Exactly 40 new codes have been added as a result of an assessment conducted by the AMA. The goal was to evaluate the current coding and billing in radiology and to discover misvalued services.

The assessment looked at a number of elements, but specifically targeted codes that were frequently performed together, and the codes that are presently growing the fastest in use.

Radiology and radiation oncology had a significant number of codes that were being used together 75% or more of the time. For that reason, these codes have been bundled in 2016.

Finally, many new codes have been added for procedures that have yet to be defined in the CPT code set.

It is very important that if you are coding and billing in radiology, you study these changes thoroughly, as 15 different areas have been significantly impacted.

Outsource Your Medical Billing

These are a lot of changes to digest, on top of the continued learning curve from ICD-10. Radiology is just one of the frequent areas of medical coding and billing that changes.

Instead of repeatedly investing your time and money into retraining yourself or a staff, outsource your medical billing! It is a professional medical biller’s job to know about these changes and stay up to date. Are you interested in learning more about how a medical billing company could help you? Message us today.