Understanding and applying AMA guidance on coding, billing to optometric clinical practice

During this year’s 2022 American Optometric Association (AOA) Optometry’s Meeting, Katie Connolly, OD, associate clinical professor at Indiana University School of Optometry, gave an update on medical charting, billing and coding. Her talk focused on understanding the general guidance provided by the American Medical Association (AMA), and how that guidance can be taken into context for optometric clinical practice.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:

I'm Dr. Katie Connolly, I'm an associate clinical professor at Indiana University School of Optometry.

I presented on coding and billing update here in 2022. And really what the talk centered on was understanding the new evaluation and management coding system that came out in early 2021. We've now been living with it for a year and a half, but there's a lot of lessons that we've learned as a profession, because really, this system was primarily developed for all of medicine. And so it's difficult then to take a broad, overall guideline that's given to us by the American Medical Association and try to apply it for how it will function for us in our clinical practice.

So the highlight really from the talk was trying to understand the guidance that was given to us from the AMA, and taking into the context the examples they gave us, what we know from the CPT book, as well as some of these big coding consultation groups that we have in optometry, try and bring that together into an easy to digest format for those of us in optometry clinical practice.