Home Health ICD-9/ICD-10 Alert

Question: How many diagnoses should I include in M0240? Many of our patients have a long list of chronic conditions and personal history of even more conditions. How do I decide which to include?

Answer: Code only those diagnoses in M0240 that remain current, or that although under control at present, could exacerbate and have an impact on the care that the home health agency is currently providing. For example, say you are seeing a patient for a foot wound and the wound is primary. But the patient also has diabetes. He is independent in self-testing, self-administration of medication, and you do not need to or have orders to actively treat the diabetes, other than teaching about its effect on healing of the foot wound. In this case, the diabetes is still coded, because it will affect the healing of the wound.

If this same patient has a history of myocardial infarction, but is stable and does not require any intervention for this old event, you need not include the MI code in the M0240 diagnoses. Include only those diagnoses that you need to treat or that impact your care.