Home Health ICD-9/ICD-10 Alert

Change: CHF is now unspecified heart failure.

When you leaf through your ICD-10 coding manual looking for a heart failure diagnosis, you'll be happy to see a structure that's pretty similar to what you're used to in ICD-9.

The I50 (Heart failure) category is very similar to ICD-9's 428 (Heart failure) category. All the same diagnoses are here, in just a slightly different sequence.

I50.1 (Left ventricular failure) starts off the list of codes in this ICD-10 category. You'll find that congestive heart failure (CHF) has been added into the diagnoses reported by ICD-10 code I50.9 (Heart failure, unspecified) rather than having it's own stand-alone code as it does in ICD-9.

The remaining I50 subcategory codes include:

• I50.2 -- Systolic (congestive) heart failure;
• I50.3 -- Diastolic (congestive) heart failure; and
• I50.4 -- Combined systolic (congestive) and diastolic (congestive) heart failure.

Each of these codes has fifth digit choices to indicate unspecified, acute, chronic, or acute on chronic heart failure, just as the corresponding ICD-9 codes do.

Note that "congestive" is a non-essential modifier in I50.2-I50.4. That means that congestive heart failure will not have to be coded additionally, when present.