Physicians who enroll in the Medicare program self-designate their Medicare physician specialty on the Medicare enrollment application (CMS-855B) or via the online enrollment system called PECOS (Provide Enrollment, Chain and Ownership System). Conversely, non-physician practitioners who enroll with Medicare are assigned a Medicare specialty code. These specialty codes describe the specific types of medicine that physicians and non-physician practitioners practice and are regularly used by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) for programmatic and claims processing purposes.
On August 22, 2014, CMS issued Change Request 8812 to establish a new physician specialty code for Interventional Cardiology (C3).
In addition, Change Request 8812 is (i) removing the word “Clinical” from the description of specialty code 62 (Psychologist (Billing Independently)), (ii) changing the description of specialty code 88 to “Unknown Provider” and (iii) changing the specialty code 95 to “Unknown Supplier”.
Change Request 8812 is effective January 1, 2015.
