You Be the Coder:
Nuclear Medicine
Published on Sun Oct 01, 2000
Test your coding knowledge. Determine how you would code this situation before looking at the box below for the answer.
Question: In reviewing transitional pass-through codes for nuclear medicine, it appears that a majority of the radiopharmaceuticals are charged per vial rather than per dose. Any suggestions on how we can bill for this?
Conrad Brown
Merriville, Ind.
Answer: Although you do not use the entire vial, the medication is billable this way. If you dispose of the remaining medication, you may still bill for the total vial. Because most radiopharmaceuticals are distributed by vial, rather than dose, there is no way to break down the medication by unit.
Another way to code this is to determine how much of the vial is used. If only half the vial is used, you could enter 0.5 in the units field of the HCFA-1500 form. This may be the most appropriate approach if you administer the radiopharmaceutical from the same vial for two different patients.