Coding for Medicare consultations.

Neurology® Clinical Practice 2010;75(Suppl 1):S56–S59 Medicare and some other carriers no longer allow use of the Consult code families. The government made this change to address problems in use of the Consult codes. Other existing codes are to be used in their place. The crosswalk to the other codes is complicated. Prolonged Services codes should be added in some cases. Neurologists need to understand these new rules to be able to code properly for patient care. An overview of rules and a coding crosswalk table are presented here. Since January 2010, the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has disallowed use of the Consultation evaluation and management (E/M) codes for Medicare patients.1 This has caused great difficulty for US neurologists. It involves both coding and income problems. This article discusses the coding problems and provides examples of how to use the new coding process.