2026 CPT Updates: High-Stakes Coding Changes Providers Can’t Afford to Miss

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  2026 CPT Updates: The High-Stakes Changes Your Providers Might Have Missed The 2026 CPT updates are not just another routine annual refresh. They represent a decisive shift in how healthcare services are documented, coded, reimbursed, and audited. For providers, billers, and healthcare executives, these changes carry real financial and compliance consequences. Missing even a single revision could mean denied claims, underpayments, or worse—an audit that unravels months of revenue. What makes 2026 different is the sheer scope of the changes. The American Medical Association (AMA) has aligned CPT updates more closely with evolving care models, including digital health, value-based reimbursement, and complex chronic care management. In plain terms, the rulebook didn’t just get edited—it got re-written in places. And while many organizations focus on headline changes, the most dangerous updates are often the subtle ones buried in descriptors, time thresholds, and parenthetical note...
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How Could Alternative Billing Help General Surgery Billing?

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“General Surgery” is a discipline of surgery having a central core of knowledge embracing anatomy, physiology, metabolism, immunology, nutrition, pathology, wound healing, shock and resuscitation, intensive care, and neoplasia, which are common to all surgical specialties. Due to the numerous illnesses looked after by a general surgeon, the billing and coding (for surgical sub-specialties too) often come with numerous challenges as well. The complexities of coding, procedure rules manifold, and complex contractual adjustments are required to be addressed with care and expertise for apt and timely reimbursements. The complexities include being knowledgeable about the latest rules such as moderate sedation being separately billable, the addition of new mammography codes, new coding for endovascular ablation and endovascular revascularization, under Hemodialysis access – coding for angioplasty and stent placement, thrombolysis or Thrombectomy, a new option for GERD – esophageal sphincter procedure, appropriate coding for fluoroscopic guidance, additions of codes such as 22853, 22854, 22859, revisions of codes 19298, 28289, 31576, along with deletions of codes such as 11752, 22851, 28290, and additional tips for distinguishing between modifier choices along with documentation tips to support billing, etc. General surgery billing and coding with the perfect association is a key step in maximizing profit, maintaining facility organization, and analyzing charges for the services you render, all the while being HIPAA compliant.

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But with increasing copays and insurance premiums, it is getting increasingly difficult for Americans to pay the high cost of healthcare. According to Christy Ford Chapin, author of Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System, “It was way back in 1938, that structural problems with US healthcare began.” With new diseases and vaccines, hospitals became a safe haven to get treated in. Though free care and the barter system were available at that time with clinics, people began to feel that it would be beneficial to pay small amounts regularly than wait for an emergency to occur and pay all at once (insurance works by the same logic today). Finally, due to the Great Depression, etc., 

To know more about How Could Alternative Billing Help General Surgery Billing?, click here: https://bit.ly/3KvgiNM Contact us at info@medicalbillersandcoders.com/ 888-357-3226.

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