The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services releases its Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) edits for Medicare quarterly. CCI edits apply when two or more codes are bundled together, but without adding other codes, they could cause your claim to be rejected.

Be sure to look at every code combination because not all code bundles are reciprocal. Although many payers do follow CMS’ CCI edits, some private payers may create their own or follow edits that come from an outside firm, which monitors and updates payer policies and guidelines. You can often utilize a payer site to see if codes are bundled.

When unbundling two codes, modifier -59 is appended to the second column code for all payers, except for CMS. Effective July 1, modifiers -59, -XE, -XS, -XP or -XU can be appended to the code in column one or column two according to a round of CCI edits that went into effect on July 1.