EDITORIAL & CODING ACCURACY

How we check what we publish.

We publish CPT coding guidance. Coding guidance that is wrong costs a practice real money, so this page sets out where our information comes from, who reviews it, and what we do when we find an error.

PRIMARY SOURCES

We work from the source documents.

Not from summaries of summaries. These are the documents behind the coding pages on this site.

AMA CPT Professional Edition

The code descriptors themselves. When a descriptor is summarised on our pages, it is summarised from the current CPT Professional Edition, not from a secondary blog or a vendor sheet.

CMS NCCI Policy Manual and quarterly edit tables

Bundling, mutually exclusive edits and modifier indicators. These change quarterly, which is why any bundling statement we publish carries the year it was checked.

CMS Physician Fee Schedule

Payment rules, TC and 26 splits, and the annual conversion factor. We publish the conversion factor and link the CMS Look-Up Tool rather than quoting dollar figures, because payment is locality adjusted.

Specialty society material

Where CPT is ambiguous in practice, we use the relevant society, for example ACC and SCAI for cardiology, ACOG for OB-GYN, and cite it by name on the page.

Benchmark data

HFMA MAP Keys, MGMA, Kodiak Solutions and AMA survey data, always attributed with the publishing year.

REVIEW

Who reviews it, and when.

Written, then checked against the source

Coding pages are drafted against the primary documents above, then reviewed by a certified coder before publication. Review is a line by line check that each descriptor, bundling statement and modifier rule matches the current source, not a proofread.

Review has changed what we published. Our electrophysiology pages were rewritten before release because the first draft treated 3D mapping as separately billable alongside 93653, 93654 and 93656. The current descriptors already include it, so billing it separately would have been wrong. Our echocardiography pages were corrected because CPT excludes 93307 with 93320, 93321 and 93325. Both were caught in review, before anything went live.

✓ Drafted against AMA CPT, CMS NCCI and the CMS Physician Fee Schedule

✓ Reviewed by a certified coder before publication

✓ Re-checked when CMS publishes quarterly NCCI updates and the annual fee schedule rule

WHAT WE COMMIT TO

The rules we hold ourselves to.

✓ Every CPT page names its sources at the bottom of the page.

✓ Code descriptors are summarised, never reproduced in full, and every page says the summary is not a substitute for the current CPT codebook.

✓ Any statement about bundling or payer policy is dated, because NCCI edits change quarterly.

✓ We do not publish per-code dollar amounts. Payment is locality adjusted, so we publish the conversion factor and link the CMS Look-Up Tool instead.

✓ We do not present published benchmark data as Sterling results.

✓ When we get something wrong, we change the page and say what changed.

CORRECTIONS

Found an error? Tell us.

Coding is contested and payer policy moves. If something on this site is wrong, or has gone out of date, email info@sterlingglobalsolution.com with the page and the code. We will check it against the current source and correct the page if it is wrong.

Nothing on this site is legal, compliance or billing advice for your specific situation. Verify against your own payer policy and the current CPT codebook before you submit.