Payment Rates Increase for Behavioral Health Office Services

by  Wyn Staheli, Director of Research
February 13th, 2018

Behavioral health providers may see some improvement in payment rates for office-based behavioral health services. This is due to the fact that the overhead expense evaluation portion of the RVU was increased. The following information is from the Federal Register (see References):

We agree with these stakeholders that the site of service differential for these services that is produced by our PE methodology seems unlikely to reflect the relative resource costs for the practitioners furnishing these services in nonfacility settings. For example, we believe the 0.02 RVUs, which translates to approximately $0.72, would be unlikely to reflect the relative administrative labor, office rent, and other overhead involved in furnishing the 45 minute psychotherapy service in a nonfacility setting. Consequently, we believe it would be appropriate to modify the existing methodology for allocating indirect PE RVUs in order to better reflect the relative indirect PE resources involved in furnishing these kinds of services in the nonfacility setting. 

We propose to set the nonfacility indirect PE RVUs for these codes using the indirect PE RVU to work RVU ratio for the most commonly furnished office-based, face-to-face service (CPT 99213) as a marker.

For CY 2018, the CPT Editorial Panel is creating CPT codes 99492, 99493, 99494, and 99484 to describe these services. For CY 2018, we are adopting these CPT codes and deleting HCPCS codes G0502, G0503, G0504, and G0507. We proposed the RUC-recommended work RVUs for each of these CPT codes, which are identical to the current values for HCPCS codes G0502, G0503, G0504, and G0507. 

For more information on the new codes and other coding and billing matters, see the Reimbursement Guide for Behavioral Health.

References:

• Federal Register Volume 82, Number 219