RAMQ Billing Codes in English: A Practical Guide
RAMQ, the Regie de l'assurance maladie du Quebec, publishes its physician billing manuals in French only. For an English-speaking physician or biller, that means the official code for a routine act can be genuinely hard to find, even when you know exactly what you did clinically.
This guide explains how the manuals are organized and how to bridge the language gap.
Why English lookup is hard
The billing manuals describe acts in clinical French. A search for "c-section" returns nothing, because the manual reads "cesarienne avec ou sans sterilisation." The code you need (06912) is there. The word you searched for is not.
That mismatch between how clinicians speak and how the schedule is written is the core problem. It is also why a plain-text search of the PDF so often fails.
How the schedule is structured
RAMQ codes are grouped by act type and specialty, each with a numeric code, an official description, and a fee. Many acts also carry premiums and restrictions, for example an urgency premium for acts performed overnight, or a limit on how often a complete examination can be billed per period.
When you read a code, always check the surrounding notes. The base fee is only part of the picture.
Looking up a code in plain language
Our Quebec cheatsheets list the most-billed RAMQ codes by specialty in plain English, with the official French description beside each one so you can match it back to the source. For anything not on those pages, the Codefinder MD app searches every provincial schedule semantically: type the procedure the way you say it and it returns the official code.
Always confirm the current code, fee, and any premium against the official RAMQ manual before you submit a claim.
Frequently asked questions
No. RAMQ publishes its physician billing manuals, the Manuel des medecins omnipraticiens and the Manuel des medecins specialistes, in French only, and there is no official English RAMQ code manual. The act code numbers and fees are identical in any language; only the official description is in French.
Because RAMQ publishes its codes in French only, the practical way to find them in English is a reference that maps the English term to the official code. Codefinder MD lists RAMQ codes with a plain-English description beside the official French wording, organized by specialty, and its app finds any code from a plain-language search. Always confirm the final code against the official RAMQ fee schedule before billing.
You can, but machine translation often mangles clinical and billing terms, and the codes still sit buried in a long French PDF you have to scroll. Codefinder MD instead maps the English description straight to the matching RAMQ act code, so you search by what you did rather than reading a translated manual.
Yes. The act code numbers and fees are identical; only the language of the official description differs. Codefinder MD lets you search in plain English and returns the official RAMQ code with its French wording, so you can verify it against the source manual.
Describe the procedure the way you say it, for example 'c-section', 'epidural for labour', or 'cataract surgery'. Codefinder MD's semantic search maps your plain-language phrase to the matching RAMQ act code across specialties, even when the official French text never uses that word.