Background:  My facility is an independent community non-profit hospital. We operate a free-standing cancer treatment center on our campus. When a patient requires transfusion there, we receive a specimen in our main lab for testing and issue blood products to the cancer center in coolers. That process is working very well.

The complicated part:  We are in the process of opening another cancer treatment center in a neighboring city about 12 miles away. The center will be located in a 'physician's building' that is physically attached to another independent hospital. This hospital is not part of us, totally independent, but we are working together for some things (we are their reference service for surgical path specimens). They will be performing some or all of the lab work for the patients seen at that cancer center. The tricky bit is going to be providing transfusions for those patients. Our employees will be transfusing the blood products according to the current plan, but who does the crossmatch/issues the blood product? We could consider stocking product there, but we can't issue it based on a crossmatch reported by the other hospital. They could crossmatch and issue the product, but for Medicare billing purposes the product charge and the infusion charge have to be together. It's not going to work to have the other hospital bill for performing the tests/issuing product and for our cancer center to bill for the infusion.  (And to further complicate things, we use Epic/Harvest/SafeTrace Tx and they use Mediware.)

Is there anyone in this group working with a scenario like this? If so, I would really appreciate any insight in how your facility makes it work.

 

       We aren't quite the same but similar. We provide blood to a cancer center in a town about 15 miles away. There is another hospital in the town that is in a different system. We provide  the blood to the cancer center. We ship it in coolers through our courier system and then the cooler comes back when the courier stops. We also supply them with platelets the same way. This way we keep all the blood under the same billing number.

 

My only recommendation is, what ever process you decide on, keep it as simple as possible.  On first thought I would keep everything in-house.  By that I mean you do all the testing and transporting.  At least with these patients you know they will be transfused and the chance of a unit being wasted is very small.  It may not be convenient but it is simple.