Laboratory Question for the Week of October 29, 2018

Question:

To follow-up on last week’s question, what functions do processing and storage costs include?

Answer:

Processing and storage costs include blood-product collection, safety testing, retyping, pooling, irradiating, leukocyte-reducing, freezing, and thawing blood products, along with the costs of blood delivery, monitoring, and storage. In general, such categories of processing costs are not patient-specific. There are specific blood HCPCS codes for blood products that have been processed in varying ways, and these codes are intended to make payment for the variable resource costs of blood products that have been processed differently.