Dr. Robert Brodell discusses technique, patient value, and billing nuances when removing lipomas in the office.
Robert Brodell, MD, is Professor and Chair in the Department of Dermatology, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, Mississippi.
“[Lipoma] patients that are used to going to a doctor when the painful ones get big enough and bothersome enough and having a big time excisional procedure… I can do 3 or 4 of these in 5 minutes,” said Robert Brodell, MD.
Dr. Brodell, Professor and Chair in the Department of Dermatology and Professor of Pathology at University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi, presented “Tips and Tricks in Procedural Dermatology for the Medical Dermatologist” at this year’s Alabama Dermatology Society Meeting. Those he discussed with The Dermatology Digest include the use of a punch to remove cysts and lipomas as well as how to get precise diagnoses for porokeratosis and other skin lesions from dermatopathology.
“I talked about things that are simple, easy, quick, almost failsafe—very few side effects or problems can result from them. And many of these are things that I improved on during my 27 years in solo private practice,” said Dr. Brodell. “…back then I didn’t have residents and students and other faculty around me, and we were just absolutely slammed with patients. I didn’t have a half a day to do excisional surgery… So anything that I could get done for the benefit of my patients in the regular flow of scheduled patients, that’s what I did,”
One of those things relates to cyst removal, which he explains in Lessons Learned from Cyst Removal, an exclusive TDD podcast in which he draws on his years of experience in private practice to impart wisdom (and humor) on this simple but useful in-office procedure.
In this video, Dr. Brodell discusses technique and value offered to patients when removing lipomas on-the-spot with a punch. He also talks billing nuances.
“When you charge for these, you don’t bill for the size of the hole… if you have a 5-cm diameter lipoma you get out through an 8 or 10 mm punch, that’s a 5-cm benign lesion you removed by that technique.”
Reference:
Tips & Tricks in Procedural Dermatology. Brodell, RT, et al. eds. Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers. New Delhi. 2019.
