The National Correct Coding Initiative (NCCI), introduced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is used to control inappropriate coding procedures. The NCCI is used to detect and eliminate coding that may lead to improper payments. The related policies are based on specific conventions, which are described in the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) manual introduced by the American Medical Association (CMS, 2020). NCCI can be used in daily coding activities as a set of guidelines to identify which codes are eligible for payment and which ones should be denied. Furthermore, the primary benefit of the NCCI is three different types of edits: Add-on-Code (AOC), Procedure-to-Procedure (PTP), and Medically Unlikely Edits (MUEs) (CMS, 2020). Each group of edits has its own function, making NCCI highly effective in terms of improper payment prevention.
Reference
CMS (2020). NCCI policy manual for Medicare. Web.