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Question: Encounter notes indicate that an epileptic patient suffers from attacks “w/no altered consciousness.” Is there an ICD-10-CM code that lines up with this diagnosis?

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Answer: Yes there is a diagnosis code for this description — but you’re going to need some more information from the notes to get the exact code you need.

Your journey to the correct ICD-10-CM code will start with G40.1- (Localization-related (focal) (partial) symptomatic epilepsy and epileptic syndromes with simple partial seizures). This is the root code you should use when a patient suffers epileptic “attacks without alteration of consciousness,” per ICD-10-CM.

Then you can move to the 5^th character, which is used in these codes to represent not intractable (5^th character “0”) or intractable (5^th character “1”) seizures.

The 6^th character of this diagnosis code is used to represent with status epilepticus (6^th character “1”) or without status epilepticus (6^th character “9”).

So, let’s say that a patient suffers from epileptic seizures without altered consciousness. The seizures are not intractable with status epilepticus. The correct diagnosis code for this patient is G40.101 (Localization-related (focal) (partial) symptomatic epilepsy and epileptic syndromes with simple partial seizures, not intractable, with status epilepticus).

Chris Boucher, MS, CPC, Senior Development Editor, AAPC