In anticipation of the 2021 E/M Outpatient Guidelines we’ve been busy reviewing the new rules and listening to expert auditors. As we all become familiar with the new guidelines , we also understand the need to explore real life applications.
Our goal in this blog series is to provide a forum regarding topics around the upcoming 2021 E/M Guidelines, to encourage community conversation on how the new guidelines might be applied. We’ll provide scenarios and expert opinion for your consideration, and we hope you’ll feel free to contribute to the thoughts and ideas presented by fellow auditors, coders, billers, CDI professionals, compliance professionals, payment integrity and risk managers.
To give a taste of what’s to come, the topics we plan to cover over the course of the next several weeks include:
- Data To Be Reviewed > Category 1 items
- Using Time to determine an Outpatient E/M code
- Documenting medical necessity
- Documenting problems
- Documenting the E/M Outpatient visit
There are many excellent presenters and experts providing training on these topics. Our goal is to highlight the “nuances” in implementing the 2021 E/M Guidelines. In these conversations, we hope to bring out potential scenarios before they become serious issues.
We hope you’ll join the conversation as we all navigate how the new Guidelines impact coding, billing, and risk. Let’s get started.