Hi,
I'm a newbie here, but my one of my specialties is Pain Management. I'm sure you've already gone to your meeting, but pain management doctors do a lot of injections, tendon sheath, joint injections, trigger points, carpel tunnel, nerve blocks. Then you have Interventional Pain Management docs who do a lot of facet joint injections some with fluro guidance. The main concern is the units too, and ensuring their services aren't bundled, and actually billing based on RVU's. A lot of ins carriers will cite Medicare's guidelines when paying for these services, so it's good to be familiar w/how MC pays for these services. I had a doctor whose biller was billing the TP w/4 units, and he wondered why he wasn't getting paid, and why all of sudden he had refund requests. I had to explain to him that for trigger point (20052/20553) is only 1 unit despite how many muscle sites he injected, the corticosteroid is inclusive in the charge, can't bill it separately. Aetna has stopped paying for TP being done in isolation aka patient needs to have comprehensive pain management care, and TP's can't be done indefinitely. Lots of changes to pain management recently, and again many ins carriers are following MC's guidelines. Good thing to do is grab MC's LCD's and NCD's based on these codes.
Dee.