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Neurology & Pain Management Coding Alert

ICD-10 Update:

Tactics Take the Ache Out of Your Migraine Diagnosis Reporting

Published on Wed May 23, 2012

Key: Severity and chronicity take you to the right code.When reporting migraine, your best approach is to confirm how severe the patient's headache was, how long has it existed, and if it has been responding to standard medication(s) in the previous attacks. The near one-on-one match from ICD-9 to ICD-10 makes it easy to report migraine.Sense the Severity of MigraineWhen reporting migraine, the first factors you should look for are the severity and length of time the patient has had. Also look at the time your physician has treated the migraine. For a chronic, continuing form of headache that isn't responding to standard treatment, you turn to codes for intractable migraine. Then confirm if your physician is treating a status migrainosus. Example 1: Your physician treats a migraine in a patient who had a headache for the past two days. The patient has a history of similar attacks that respond [...]
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