# CPT 78452

> Medicare paid $486.41 for CPT 78452 in the office (non-facility) setting and $486.41 in a facility under the Q1 2021 Physician Fee Schedule, effective January 2021. These are the national allowed amounts before the ~2% sequestration cut and before locality (GPCI) adjustment. This is a 0.4% increase from the previous quarter.

## 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: Q1 2021 (2021 A)
- Effective: January 1 – March 31, 2021
- Status indicator: A
- Office (non-facility) national allowed amount: $486.41
- Facility national allowed amount: $486.41
- Sequestration: not applied

## RVUs and formula

- Work RVU: 1.62
- Office (non-facility) practice expense RVU: 12.21
- Facility practice expense RVU: 12.21
- Malpractice RVU: 0.11
- Conversion factor: 34.8931
- Formula: `(work_rvu × work_gpci + pe_rvu × pe_gpci + mp_rvu × mp_gpci) × conversion_factor`

## Source and citation

- Source: Physician relative value file (Q1 2021)
- CMS file: https://www.cms.gov/files/zip/rvu21a-updated-01052021.zip
- Parsed file: PPRRVU21_JAN.csv, row 13,673
- Canonical page: https://localishealth.com/cpt/78452/2021/A
- Release-specific citation URL: https://localishealth.com/cpt/78452/2021/A
- Last significant update: 2026-08-04T03:10:16+00:00