Home Health & Hospice Week

you'll need to know how to categorize your care by encounter. Check out this common diagnosis to discover what you'll report after Oct.1, 2013.

When providing care for a patient's infected surgical wound, you currently report 998.59 (Other postoperative infection).

ICD-10 difference: When you make the switch to ICD-10, you'll report infected surgical wounds with T81.4xx-.

Indicate the encounter: ICD-10 codes can include up to seven characters, and in this case you'll need all seven. The fifth and sixth digits will be "x," which leaves room for future expansion of this sub-category, but you will need to choose a seventh digit to indicate whether this is an initial encounter when reporting a code from the T81 category. Your choices are:

A: Initial encounter -- The patient is receiving active treatment;

D: Subsequent encounter -- The patient has already received active treatment, and is now receiving routine care during the healing or recovery phase; or

S: Sequela -- The patient is being treated for complications or conditions that arise as a direct result of an injury. This is equivalent to what we currently call "late effects."

Due to the nature of home care, home care providers will generally never use "A." Instead, they'll choose either "D" or "S."