Medical Economics June 28, 2022
Study finds greater use of prevention, care coordination codes could bolster practices’ bottom lines
Primary care physicians (PCPs) could be foregoing more than $200,000 annually by not billing Medicare’s prevention and care coordination billing codes as often as they could, according to results of a new study in Annals of Internal Medicine.
The authors analyzed the potential and actual use of 19 prevention and 15 care coordination codes from 2005 to 2020, representing 13 categories of service in the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule. The codes, they note, “attempt to recognize various services that PCPs frequently provide without payment while also encouraging PCPs to deliver services believed to be beneficial to patients.”
In 2019, Medicare paid PCPs $1.2 billion for prevention...