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Wiki Coding for nurse placing port and injecting medicine for a lab to draw and test blood

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dsheldon

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If a nurse places a port in a patient and injects medicine 3 times with the patient being sent to lab to draw blood to test after each injection, would we could a 99211 and the medicine? Or is there a different code for placing port. The lab nearby will not place the port or inject.
 
port codes, etc.

I'm a coding student and cannot provide a definite answer. I hope you don't mind if I write about this based on my studies. Here is my take:

It seems we code 36560 for the port insertion if the patient is under 5 years of age, or 36561 if the patient is over 5 years old. I'm wondering about the age of this patient and if they are 65+ y.o. with Medicare, my understanding is we use a HCPCS code for the medication that's being injected. 99211 is for initial hospital care for Inpatient services... I'm wondering where this service is taking place (i.e. in the inpatient or outpatient setting, SNF, etc.)? My gut says modifier -26 is used with the E/M code because of the drawing blood at the lab...it seems this is a professional component that is separately identifiable, but I could be wrong about this.... I'm wondering what type of blood test was done, and what kind of medication was injected, and if the injection x3 and blood draw x3 was done on the same day or on different days.

I have no clue if that helps or not, but I hope it does. And if not, thank you for your question becomes it also helps me with my college studies.

Sincerely,

Jacob
 
Do you mean the nurse is accessing the port? 36560 "placing a port" I believe is the surgical procedure to implant the port, which would be done by a surgeon.

The nurse would access the implanted port by inserting a needle into it for administering a med. I don't think phlebotomists do this, so that would explain why the nurse did it. Usually blood can be drawn from the port, so there must have been some reason why the patient had to go over to the lab for blood draws.

I'm not sure on the codes; the medication used and whether it was an IV push or infusion, how long, etc all would affect that.

Hope that helps!
 
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