[Histonet] IHC billing CoPath workaround

[Terri Braud]

We have a great workaround in built in CoPath.  
Every antibody in our IHC dictionary, is built in triplicate.  
One is called "[Ab name]-Primary" with a 88342 CPT code, 
the second is called "[Ab name]-Add" with an 88341 CPT code.  
The third is "[Ab name]-NC for no charge or N/A in the CoPath dictionary. This is for when the pathologists wants the same antibody on multiple blocks for the same specimen (which can't be charged) 
Then we just educated everyone on how to order correctly and provided a cheat sheet.  For panels, the stain groups were built correctly so that the first Ab ordered is always 88342, and the remaining charge as 88341.
It has worked very well for us with few mistakes at implementation. It bills correctly, counts stained slides correctly, and orders across the interface to the stainer correctly, so that we get the right bar code labels for our IHC stainer.
A win-win situation.

From: histonet-bounces at lists.utsouthwestern.edu [mailto:histonet-bounces at lists.utsouthwestern.edu] On Behalf Of Cartun, Richard
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2015 5:33 PM
Subject: [Histonet] IHC billing question

Effective January 1, 2015, our LIS team removed all of the CPT 88342 codes for IHC from our CoPath stain dictionary since you couldn't tell whether a Cytokeratin-7 was being performed as an "88341" or as an "88342".  Now, as you might have expected,  none of the "inpatient" IHC testing has been accounted for (the outpatient IHC has been billed manually from the pathology report), and they want someone to go back and enter all the CPT codes into the system (hopefully, not me!).  Has anyone else encountered this problem?  Thanks (I think).

Richard
Richard W. Cartun, MS, PhD
Director, Histology & Immunopathology
Director, Biospecimen Collection Programs Assistant Director, Anatomic Pathology Hartford Hospital
80 Seymour Street
Hartford, CT  06102
(860) 972-1596
(860) 545-2204 Fax
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