Wiki Pain Management Drug Screening

erinal

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Hello! I am a pain management coder and have a question about presumptive drug screening. We collect urine samples from our patients for drug screening/monitoring and then we send them to a local lab who performs the testing. They perform a presumptive screen utilizing an analyzer (80307) and a definitive test (G0480).

My doctors are wanting to purchase cups so that we can do an initial presumptive test in the office. It would be a cup that reads the results on the outside. They are wanting us to bill for this screen (I am thinking 80305?) but then they want to send the samples to the lab to perform the 80307 and G0480...Can we do that? I know that you can't code 80305 and 80307 together but does it make a difference that the provider's office would be the one billing for the 80305 and then the lab billing for the 80307? My initial thought when the physicians brought it up is that we won't be able to bill 80305 of the lab is going to bill 80307... What are your thoughts?
 
We used to do this years ago and we no longer do this because the results of the rapid cup don't change our treatment, and don't affect whether we send it for confirmation or not - they were all sent. There is also the issue of an unacceptable rate of false positives - you only have to question one person one time for what turns out to be a false positive for methamphetamine and then they never trust you again.

If you're not going to do anything with the results OR you're sending them all for confirmation regardless, then it isn't medically necessary and eventually you'll get in trouble.

At the time, we were billing 80305QW, but it's been years.
 
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