Ask Dr. Z

Physician does a primary thrombectomy of the right fem/pop stent graft using a cutdown procedure in the right common femoral for access and then uses a Fogarty balloon to reach the thrombus. A cutdown access years ago automatically meant an open procedure, but I thought the AHA had clarified that in the past few years, so since he is not accessing the SFA/pop graft directly (probably not a great idea) this would not be considered "open" but percutaneous since he was working further downstream on the SFA/pop graft, right? I could not figure out the specifics of code 35875, as there are not guidelines in the CPT Codebook like there are for 37184. I am trying to figure out which code best describes this procedure, 37184 or 35875. Please enlighten me on this code selection.