Alicia: Alright.
This one isn't very hard once you know where to look, but I actually had to Google to get
some more information because I couldn't find it.
And again, Laureen probably could have done this one and done it much faster and better
than I did because she's much better at CPT than I am.
But the question was, Is there a thyroid profile or is it build separately?
A: Actually one of the great places as I pull the screen over, Quest Diagnostic is a company
that does a lot of lab work and they have really good information, that's where I got
this.
So, first let's break it down, there is CPT code Quest Diagnostic 4A, and I changed this,
is a thyroid panel, not a profile, so that will give you some troubles if your verbiage
is off just a little bit.
They were telling me for a thyroid panel, these are the two codes that they use: 84436
and then 84479, and those include, and it goes in to detail what tests are included
in that.
I went in and found the explanation for 84436, which gives you all of these, it tells you
what it does and what it doesn't do for that particular code and it tells you why this
test is performed.
Neonates get this test, which I thought was very, very interesting.
Then, 84476 being explained, aAgain, this has your T3 and T4s.
The reason they used these abbreviations is because nobody can really actually in real
life pronounce this term, and so they abbreviate that stuff, and you know T-thyroid it's not
as bad as you think.
That wasn't the most common.
I remember seeing thyroid panels and they usually have this TSA with them -- it's always
with TSA.
So, I thought, well there's this specific code for that that Quest Diagnostic had, so
I thought I remember seeing that.
Then, that is the other two panels with this additional test run, a thyroid stimulating
hormone or TSH, which is a TSA.
So, you get all of those other two plus this thyroid stimulating, and it tells why they
do this in this description right here, that if patients with symptoms of weight gain,
tiredness, dry skin; so they'll do this to see what is the problem.
One of them has to do with endocrine.
The pituitary is messed up and the other ones have to do with the thyroid itself, I believe.
So, to determine actually what the problems is, if they know there's possibly a problem
with thyroid, they break it up and do all of those tests and they billed the top two
codes together.
In my impression of what that's saying is that if you have those -- if you're going
to do a thyroid profile, you use those first two codes.
If you're going to do a thyroid profile with a TSA or TSH, then you do, you add it.
There's three codes together, not one code that encompasses all of them, and they're
all in that same section.
If you can't find it, you can't do it for the test go Google it -- thyroid profile -- and
boom, boom, boom!
It's amazing all the stuff that came up.