Hello all,

When you send the positive antibody for ID to referance lab and when the results comes back, how do you attach the billing part or how do you handle the billing that needs to charge to patient in your blood bank system that you use. We have sunquest (MYSIS) and we order antibody ID in TYSC if positive and if can't figure out the ID, sends to referance lab and once the results back, put that in antibody ID section which we order in TYSC and then order a comment code and enters that antibody ID done at ...... referance lab. But I was just wondering how my billing department will know that this ID was done at ref. lab and needs to charge more than  they charge regularly for inhouse IDs? 

You can build a new billing code for the reference lab charge and add it in BOP to the TYSC. RLABID or something like it. Be sure to build the corresponding credit code in case you add it in error and you need to credit.

Thank you Tricore. I will ask our IT person to help build us both codes. thanks

I manually bill for those charges. I have access to patient billing, use the CPT codes for the tests I'm billing and add pricing. It works, takes about 2 minutes, and we don't send a large volume of work to reference so  it's not a lot of work to do it that way. It's an option if there is a problem with adding it to your system.

I also manually bill for these charges.  The reference lab sent me the CPT codes and I charge everything as a "Bill only" charge.  If we do an antibody ID in house, it's billed as ABID.  When it is done at the reference lab it is BO ABID ADD for additional, since we do charge for ABID even if we can't come up with an answer.  So there is BO ELUTION, BO PHENOTYPE, etc.  We built our charges for these to be a little more than the reference lab charges to cover shipping, etc.

Our reference lab provides an itemized invoice of testing performed and the associated CPT codes. We have "charge only" tests that we add to the requisition of the original test request based on the invoice. We do a similar process for in-house antibody identifications. All workups are reviewed the next business day, we note the different tests/method counts at the bottom of the AB ID worksheet, and add the appropriate charge only tests to the requisition based on the actual tests performed.

Yes, our reference lab also provides an itemized list with CPT codes.  I review all antibody workups the next day I work and charge for things like antigen typing and DATs if autocontrol is positive, since we don't do any elutions or other fancy stuff!