QN Modifier in Ambulance Transportation – you ought to know

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QN Modifier in Ambulance Transportation you
ought to know

• Medical Billers and Coders

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For Medicare, modifiers are 2-digit codes that
are appended to procedural codes and HCPCS codes.
These modifiers are used to give more details
about the billed procedure. The addition of
modifiers in a claim can directly impact payment.
You can get a list of modifiers on the internet
at any time where you will get modifier
descriptions and instructions. Additionally, you
also can get information on whether the modifier
affects the Medicare payment or not.
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QN modifier is the sub-category of HCPCS
modifiers and acts in almost exactly the same way
as CPT codes. CPT and HCPCS codes are not the
same, in fact, that providers can regularly use
modifiers from one code set to the other. The
HCPCS modifier LT, as an example, is regularly
used in CPT codes when the provider needs to
describe a bilateral procedure that was only
carried out on one side of the body.
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Medicare Billing QN Modifier QN modifier is
used for an Ambulance service provided directly
by a provider of services. Generally, for
ambulance services, a 1-digit modifier is
combined to form a 2-digit modifier that
indicates the first digit provides info about the
ambulances place of origin, and the second digit
provides info about the ambulances destination.
Both QM and QN modifiers are effective for
Medicare.
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When and Where to use the QN modifier? Lets
take an example where the patient is Asthmatic
and he is having some breathing problem, he
informed his problem physicians to seek help. The
physician asked him to go straight to the
emergency room. Now here, in the hospital,
physicians have arranged transportation with the
service provider to pick up the patient in an
ambulance with a basic life support system.
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Here in this example, patients have used
ambulance services. Now, in order to code this
procedure on a claim, you can look at the A-codes
of HCPCS, where ambulances codes exist in. A0428
is there and labeled as for Ambulance Services,
non-emergency transport, basic life support. Here
you got the base HCPCS code. But in this example
physician has arranged ambulance transport with
the help of the service provider. That means the
ambulance provided by the healthcare provider so
now we can add a modifier to give more details
about this to the payer. Now you can look for a
modifier that relates to ambulance service. Here
QN modifier comes in a picture, it can help you
for the Ambulance service provider directly by a
provider of services.
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Finally, our code will look like this A0428-QN
for a basic life support ambulance service,
non-emergency transport, provided by the provider
of services. Coding with HCPCS modifiers will
not always be as simple as this example, but that
your medical coding staff or your partnered
billing company should inform you that how these
additions to the code set help you to code to the
highest level of accuracy to get your deserve
reimbursement from the insurance company in the
first attempt. That concludes this course on how
to use the QN modifier. Like the other HCPCS code
set, it is simple to get overwhelmed by the
variety and number of options available to code.
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