Forum - Questions & Answers

May 20th, 2010 - ShannonC

Chemotherapy treatment rescheduled.....billing for drugs?

We had a new situation today come about that I am not sure of and any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated!

We have a patient who brought in drug they obtained from their pharmacy for chemotherapy, however, the patients chemotherapy was cancelled. When contacting the pharmacy, they will not accept the drug back. Can we keep that drug and administer and bill to other patients, or do we have to discard?

Thanks again for any input!

May 20th, 2010 -

Well...

this is outside coding but...
who paid for the drug? I imagine the patient's insurance did if they got it from the pharmacy so they need to be notified that the drug they paid for was not going to be used. Especially if the next dose will therefore be coming up sooner than expected and that dose could be denied.
how safe is it? Depending on how it was presented to you (packaging/seals/protections), is it safe to give this med to another patient? What about stability? Did the patient store it properly? Do you want to risk that?

One of the White House doctors was fired when Clinton came into office. The doc would not administer Clinton's allergy shots that he brought from Little Rock since he had no idea what was really in the vial, even though Clinton told him what it was and where it came from. The doc stuck by his standard that if he did not order it and mix it, he could not guarantee the safety and he would not give it.

And how can you bill for something you did not pay for? Urologists got in trouble for taking free samples of Lupron and charging patient's insurance for that med. That's is Medicare fraud- do not go there.



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