Oncology & Hematology Coding Alert

Does the clinical terminology surrounding bone marrow and hematopoietic stem cell harvesting always sound like Greek to you? If it does, maybe a little refresher on the codes you need for donor review and stem cell harvesting/storage is in order.

Here are four tricky little questions to help you distinguish between apheresis procedures and sort your therapeutic from your diagnostic procedure code choices.

Question 1: Your provider decides to undergo a review of compatible stem cell donors in order to possibly perform a stem cell transplant on a leukemia patient. What does the process involve, and is there a CPT^® code you can use to document it?

Question 2: The management team approves the patient’s identical twin as a donor, and your provider goes ahead and performs a syngeneic stem cell harvest with stem cells taken from the donor’s bone marrow. What CPT^® code would you use to document this and why?

Question 3: Instead of harvesting stem cells from the donor’s bone marrow, your oncologist decides to harvest them from the donor’s blood using an apheresis device, a process known as hematopoietic stem cell harvesting. What CPT^® code(s) would you use for this, and which CPT® code(s) would not be appropriate to use for this procedure?

Question 4: If your provider harvests hematopoietic cells, the cells have to be preserved and prepared for use in the patient. Which CPT^® code(s) would you use for that, and which CPT^® code(s) would not be appropriate to use?

Think you know the answers? Click here and find out!