Your organization has a physician who performs total anterio…

Your organization has a physician who performs total anterior lumbar arthroplasty with artificial discs on an outpatient basis. Unfortunately, after several procedures have been performed and billed, you get a memo from the business office stating that there are denials for Medicare patients. The billing manager states that the reason given is status indicator C. She would like you to review the CPT code assignment(s) and help resolve the problem because the charges for these procedures exceed $65,000 per case.After reviewing the cases, you find that the correct CPT code is assigned:*22857–Total disc arthroplasty (artificial disc), anterior approach, including discectomy to prepare interspace (other than for decompression), single interspace, lumbar * denotes a status indicator of C for that CPT code. What is status indicator C?