Bladder Cancer & Intravesical Therapy - CTR Coding Break (December 2020)

The December CTR Coding Break reviews the topic ‘Bladder Cancer and Intravesical Therapy’. The slides provide a definition of what Intravesical therapy is, how the therapy is administered, and the different types of Intravesical therapy given.
When a patient undergoes a TURBT followed by Intravesical therapy it’s important to code correctly the surgical treatment code(s) sequence along with correctly coding the chemotherapy or immunotherapy (BCG) treatment given. The presentation provides the surgical codes as listed in the Store Manual Appendix B page 482 for Bladder ICD-O-3 Topography codes C67.0-C67.9. During the presentation, we review two case scenarios in which a patient undergoes TURBT followed by Intravesical therapy during the same admission and TURBT followed by Intravesical therapy given during a different encounter. When a TURBT and Intravesical Therapy are given during the same encounter, the surgical treatment should reflect one of the bladder surgical codes of 20-25. The intravesical therapy given will be coded as either chemotherapy or immunotherapy. When Intravesical therapy is given during a different encounter, the Intravesical therapy will be coded as surgical procedure code 15 or 16 depending on the type of therapy provided.