Home Health ICD-9/ICD-10 Alert

You have two years left to prepare for the diagnosis coding shift.

When coding for a patient with an unspecified pneumonia diagnosis, you would generally report the ICD-9 code 486 (Pneumonia, organism unspecified).

Come 2013 when ICD-9 transitions to ICD-10 you'll list four digits for these patients: J18.9 (Pneumonia, unspecified organism).

ICD difference: Category J18 (Pneumonia, unspecified organism) provides codes for reporting several different types of pneumonia when you don't know the organism responsible for the condition. These include:

In ICD-9, the unspecified organism codes for these different types of pneumonia were broken out across several code categories.