Immunohistochemistry cocktails are here to stay: Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services should revise its new reimbursement policy

摘要

On January 1st, 2012, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented a policy in conjunction with the National Correct Coding Initiative (NCCI) to pay pathologists and laboratories for immunohistochemistry (IHC) cocktail stains as a single unit of Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code 88342, regardless of how many individually interpretable antibodies are included in the cocktail. Medicare has, in the past, paid for IHC cocktail stains based on the American Medical Association's prescription: 1 unit of CPT code 88342 was payable for each separately interpreted and reported antibody (eg, via unique color expression compared with other markers in the cocktail).