December 3, 2024

Onco Professional Services — Did You Know — Margins 7 vs. 9

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ONCO > Onco Professional Services — Did You Know — Margins 7 vs. 9

Onco Professional Services provides Management, Quality Control, Abstracting, Casefinding, and Follow-Up to help facilities achieve their goals. Periodically, our Onco Professional Services Staff share education and training documents internally on various topics related to the Cancer Registry; we call these bite-sized educational topics, “Did You Knows?”.  Did You Knows are a valuable resource for our team, helping our staff stay up to date on registry-related topics. Going forward, we will share some of these via our blog periodically.  We hope you find them as beneficial as our team does.

Background: There can be some confusion related to coding Margin Status for certain primary sites. Today’s “Did You Know” will address the difference between coding margin status as 7 vs. 9.

Did You Know:  Margin Code 7 and Margin Code 9 have definite differences?

Information:  We usually look for margin status for solid tumors, but sometimes the information is not available.  Bladder and Brain path reports often don’t include the information although visible tumor is noted on the Op Note.

Coding Instructions:

  • Record the margin status as it appears in the pathology report.
  • Code 7 if the pathology report indicates the margins could not be determined.
  • Code 9 if the pathology report makes no mention of margins or no tissue was sent to pathology.

The Pathologist needs to state “margins could not be determined” to use Code 7.

Margins need to be noted on the path report to code anything other than Code 9.   If margins are not addressed at all on the path report, they should be noted as Code 9.

* It needs to be stated by the Pathologist there is “tumor visible to the naked eye” on the path report to use Code 3.

Example 1:   Brain Tumor Resection-Op Note-All visible tumor was resected. Path-Margins cannot be determined.  This is a statement addressing the margins.  Code 7

Example 2:  Bladder Tumor Resection-TURBT Op Note-No residual disease.  The margin status is not addressed at all on the path report.  Code 9

Example 3:  Brain Tumor Resection-Op Note-Visible residual tumor could not be safely resected.

The margin status is not addressed at all on the path report. Code 9

 

 

Reference(s):

Store Manual 2024, p. 215

NAACCR Data Item (1320)