The American Medical Association's CPT Assistant (December 2014) describes advance care planning (ACP) as "learning about and considering the types of decisions that will need to be made at the time of an eventual life-ending situation and what the patient's preferences would be regarding those decisions," and offers an example of a patient who may need ACP services:
A single 68 year old male with several chronic but stable conditions presents to his physician with his brother to discuss his overall prognosis, the likely disease trajectory of his illnesses, possible future complications and available treatments with their risks, burdens and likely outcomes. An explanation and discussion of advance directives takes place but no advanced directive was prepared.
According to CPT Assistant (February 2016), factors under consideration may include:
• the patient's current disease state
• disease progression; available treatments
• cardiopulmonary resuscitation/ life sustaining measures
• do not resuscitate orders; life expectancy based on the patient’s age and co-morbidities
• clinical recommendations of the treating physician, including reviews of patient’s past medical history and medical documentation/reports, and response(s) to previous treatments
CPT® provides two codes to describe time spent with a patient, family member, or surrogate discussing advanced directives, medical orders for life-sustaining treatment, living wills, or similar advance care planning:
99497 Advance care planning including the explanation and discussion of advance directives such as standard forms (with completion of such forms, when performed), by the physician or other qualified health care professional; first 30 minutes, face-to-face with the patient, family member(s), and/or surrogate
99498 … each additional 30 minutes (List separately in addition to code for primary procedure)
Code 99497 describes an initial 30 minutes of the providers' time (face-to-face with the patient, family, or surrogate). You should report only one unit of 99497, per date of service. Code 99498 reports each additional 30-minutes of service, beyond the initial 30 minutes (at least 16 minutes must pass beyond the initial 30 minutes to report 99498). For example, for 35 minutes of face-to-face ACP, proper coding is 99497; for 57 minutes of face-to-face advance care planning, proper coding is 99497, 99498.
Because these services are time-based, the provider must document the face-to-face time spent with the patient, family member, or surrogate. The best practices are noting start and stop times, total face-to-face time, a summary of the points discussed, and other relevant details such as the patient's response or decisions related to the discussion. The codes account only for the provider's time and expertise, and do not include active management of a problem(s).