# CPT 78452

> Medicare paid $484.68 for CPT 78452 in the office (non-facility) setting and $484.68 in a facility under the Q3 2020 Physician Fee Schedule, effective July 2020. These are the national allowed amounts before the ~2% sequestration cut and before locality (GPCI) adjustment. This price has been unchanged since Q1 2020, when it decreased 1.1%.

## 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: Q3 2020 (2020 C)
- Effective: July 1 – September 30, 2020
- Status indicator: A
- Office (non-facility) national allowed amount: $484.68
- Facility national allowed amount: $484.68
- Sequestration: not applied

## RVUs and formula

- Work RVU: 1.62
- Office (non-facility) practice expense RVU: 11.67
- Facility practice expense RVU: 11.67
- Malpractice RVU: 0.14
- Conversion factor: 36.0896
- Formula: `(work_rvu × work_gpci + pe_rvu × pe_gpci + mp_rvu × mp_gpci) × conversion_factor`

## Source and citation

- Source: Physician relative value file (Q3 2020)
- CMS file: https://www.cms.gov/files/zip/rvu20c-updated-06192020.zip
- Parsed file: PPRRVU20_V0618.csv, row 13,713
- Canonical page: https://localishealth.com/cpt/78452/2020/A
- Release-specific citation URL: https://localishealth.com/cpt/78452/2020/C
- Last significant update: 2026-08-04T03:09:46+00:00