Congratulations Alex, strong work, and thanks for sharing this experience. Can you tell me in what setting these were performed? ASC, OBL, Hospital? I wasn’t aware that the codes and reimbursement issues were settled yet; expect to get more info at CiDA next week.
Ted

Thanks Ted.

These first patients, we did in the Hospital Cardiac Cath Lab Angio suites as out patients. The plan is to move these procedures into our Hospital base outpatient Vascular access center, where I am the Medical Director.

Currently SVS and CMS have to generate a final code. This is already in process as far as I know.

For the time being we are charging the Surgical code and S&I code for each of the steps of the procedure. We are also working with our coding department to make sure we are charging appropriately. We do not really know what the final reimbursement will be.

We felt this important and beneficial enough for a large number of our patient population that we decided to proceed prior to CMS's Final determination.

Thankfully our group (NHS Vascular) and our institution (SSM Health) have been very supportive of us (The VAC team) spearheading this endeavor. We hope that the reimbursement reflects the clinical benefit.

Alex