Q: Last week you talked about the MAC editing for medically necessary services related to the local coverage determination (LCD). What do we do if we have a situation where we believe that the list of covered diagnoses is not complete? How do we get our MAC to consider that information? We placed a call, but nothing has happened and we’ve received no response.
Q: We are having difficulty getting our patient financial services group to route claims back to us that hit edits for lack of a medically necessary diagnosis. We have found one procedure-to-diagnosis pairing that is faulty because it is a crossover from a local coverage determination (LCD) that has multiple procedure codes related to a procedure. One of the procedure codes happens to be on this claim, but as a standalone procedure and not as part of the service described by the LCD. How do we get them to understand that the edit is not always correct for the individual situation?
Q: I work in a behavioral health hospital and am looking for guidance relating to disclosures as part of the Clozapine REMS Program. In order for a patient to fill a prescription for Clozapine at an outside pharmacy (not our on-site pharmacy), the pharmacy is required to have a copy of the patient's latest blood draw (absolute neutrophil count). Is the patient required to sign a release of information for us to be able to send the latest blood draw results, or is sharing the results with the outside pharmacy considered part of the process when the patient is registered in the Clozapine program?
In addition, if the latest lab results contain more information than what is required for the Clozapine prescription to be filled, should we edit the results to only include what is specifically needed by the pharmacy?
A: Releasing this information is considered treatment, so the patient's authorization is not needed. Editing the results report to release only the neutrophil count would be a good practice, if it is reasonable to do that. If not, it would be acceptable to release the complete results containing the neutrophil count, since the minimum necessary requirement does not apply to treatment disclosures.
Editor's note: This question was answered by Mary Brandt. Brandt is a healthcare consultant specializing in healthcare regulatory compliance and operations improvement. She is also an advisory board member for BOH. This information does not constitute legal advice. Consult legal counsel for answers to specific privacy and security questions. Email your HIPAA questions to Associate Editor Nicole Votta at nvotta@hcpro.com.
Q: We are having a heated internal discussion regarding reporting drug infusion charges when a multi-lumen catheter is being used. Nursing wants to charge for both lumens as if they were a separate line because they are hanging different medications and fluids through each one. When we tried this on a claim, the edits were either saying we needed to append a modifier for one of the initial hours of service or we hit the medically unlikely edit because of too many units. How is this supposed to be reported?
Q: I have a follow-up question to last week’s answer about lab payments. We should receive payment for a lab-only claim because of the new Q4 status indicator. However, we noticed that sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t. The difference seems to be when we report a venipuncture and when we report the blood being drawn from a ventricular assist device (VAD). When the venipuncture is reported, we get paid for all line items. When the blood draw is from a VAD, we don’t get paid for the lab work. Is this correct?
Q: If we're not using condition code W2 but we're billing on the type of bill (TOB) 121 after we received a denial, are we paid less than if the W2 would have been used?
Q: I was at a conference last week and while we were on a break, I heard someone say that we don’t have to use modifier -L1 (separately payable laboratory test) to get paid for lab work from Medicare. Is that true?
