# CPT 78452

> Medicare paid $493.03 for CPT 78452 in the office (non-facility) setting and $493.03 in a facility under the Q4 2016 Physician Fee Schedule, effective October 2016. These are the national allowed amounts before the ~2% sequestration cut and before locality (GPCI) adjustment. This price has been unchanged since Q1 2016, when it increased 0.1%.

## What it is

The nuclear cardiac stress test. A small amount of radioactive tracer is injected into a vein, travels to the heart muscle in proportion to blood flow, and a rotating gamma camera builds cross-sectional (SPECT) images of how well blood reaches each wall of the left ventricle. This code is the multiple-study version - images are taken both at rest and again after the heart is stressed by exercise or a medication - so the two sets can be compared to tell a permanently scarred area from one that is starved of blood only under demand. A single-study version and add-on wall-motion analysis exist as separate codes; this one also takes in ECG-gated imaging and quantitative measurement when they are done as part of the same study.

## Selected release

- Release: Q4 2016 (2016 D)
- Effective: October 1 – December 31, 2016
- Status indicator: A
- Office (non-facility) national allowed amount: $493.03
- Facility national allowed amount: $493.03
- Sequestration: not applied

## RVUs and formula

- Work RVU: 1.62
- Office (non-facility) practice expense RVU: 12.02
- Facility practice expense RVU: 12.02
- Malpractice RVU: 0.13
- Conversion factor: 35.8043
- Formula: `(work_rvu × work_gpci + pe_rvu × pe_gpci + mp_rvu × mp_gpci) × conversion_factor`

## Source and citation

- Source: Physician relative value file (Q4 2016)
- CMS file: https://www.cms.gov/medicare/medicare-fee-for-service-payment/physicianfeesched/downloads/rvu16d.zip
- Parsed file: PPRRVU16_V0804.csv, row 12,882
- Canonical page: https://localishealth.com/cpt/78452/2016/A
- Release-specific citation URL: https://localishealth.com/cpt/78452/2016/D
- Last significant update: 2026-08-04T03:07:13+00:00