In 2022, HealthCare Chaplaincy Network (HCCN) and strategic partners achieved historic success in their advocacy efforts for the integration of spiritual care in health care. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) approved three new procedure codes for identifying and evaluating chaplain services in all health care settings.

Chaplains working in health care may be familiar with the Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS). These codes are used by health care professionals, insurance companies, and government agencies to communicate about health care services provided to patients, to ensure that accurate data records are kept, and to facilitate the proper billing and reimbursement for billable services. 

Historically, chaplaincy as a non-billable service has been almost entirely excluded from this system. With the introduction of the CMS chaplain services codes, however, chaplains will now be on an equal footing with other health care professionals in recording the clinical work in which they engage. While these codes cannot be used at present to bill directly for chaplain services provided, they do give chaplains visibility for their contributions to a patient’s overall care through spiritual assessment (Q9001), individual spiritual counseling (Q9002), and group spiritual counseling (Q9003). The data provided from using the codes will for the first time provide a greater sense of the impact and quality of chaplaincy care on patients, families, staff, and institutions along with greater ease for including chaplains in bundled payment options.

This resource center provides chaplains and chaplaincy department managers with the basic information they need to understand the importance of these codes and to begin incorporating and using them across health care systems. Additional resources on the purpose, importance, and value of clinical chaplaincy in health care can be found here.