How to enter different versions of HCPCS item on fee sheet

Day-to-Day Users
#1

New user here.

We need to bill for dialysis solution. There’s just one HCPCS code for a package size, e.g., A4721 for 1000 to 1999cc. But in that size range there can be different concentrations and they are all priced differently. How do others go about dealing with this issue on the fee sheets? We can’t enter duplicate HCPCS in Codes. Use NDCs?

Thanks.

#2

hi @terryb9 , might have to use NDCs but that won’t help with the price. Can you add multiples of those codes and vary the description and price for easy selection?

edit: I guess you can’t after testing so this is going to take a little looking into…

good news, the field code is not a unique index in the codes table :slight_smile:

#3

Thanks for looking and testing.

I saw that the “code” keyname was not unique in MySQL, so apparently that duplicate check is something programmatic?

I guess I could slog through the code and try to find out and turn it off. Then repeat for every version update.

But was really hoping people had a better solution.

#4

could you set the fee to the highest price?

#5

Thanks for the responses and suggestion Stephen.

I also wanted the different descriptions for those different HCPCS, so really needed multiple Code records.

There was indeed code in one of the programs that enforced uniqueness on inserts, but simply overriding that to insert dups turned out to be a bad idea or at least one that would require a lot more work.

Unique codes are assumed a lot of other places in OpenEMR, not least of which is the dropdown where one selects some CPT4 or HCPCS for a fee sheet. It would always pick the first one and there wasn’t enough information carried in the dropdown HTML to construct a more unique query, so going down that path was going to be lot of hacking.

What I ended up doing is just creating codes with some bogus suffix like A47211 and A47212 to allow “duplicate” codes in the database and throughout the process, and then to get rid of that during billing added a bit of PHP string code to strip off those **x suffixes on the way out in programs like hcfa1500.php Not an elegant solution but so far it seems to be working. We shall see.

Thanks again.