Orthopedic Coding Alert

Use this spine anatomy tip to simplify your coding What's so difficult about coding for orthopedics? Thoughts of the human skeleton immediately bring up thoughts of Halloween and all sorts of scary things. So coding for orthopedics is bound to be scary as well, right? Not in the least. It's all basic anatomy. Anatomic Knowledge Can Save the Day I-ll never forget my introduction into the importance of at least a cursory knowledge of anatomy in orthopedic coding. I was the coding supervisor for a large orthopedic practice in North Carolina, and a long-term employee transferred a call from a Medicare patient. The patient was irate because she had been billed for "a broken neck" repair although she had never been treated for a broken neck. She wanted her medical record corrected immediately. The patient account representative was appalled at the practice's inappropriate coding and transferred the call to me to handle. When I first took the call, I too was embarrassed that my department had made such a mistake in billing. Upon listening to the patient's history and subsequent treatment, however, I found that the "broken neck" the patient had experienced was actually a true orthopedic problem that had been diagnosed correctly -- a fracture of the femoral neck. Lesson learned: If you are an orthopedic coder, you probably recognize the humor in that story. If orthopedics is new to you, or you typically code for another specialty, you may not realize that a femoral neck fracture is a fracture far away from the neck that holds your head up. The femoral neck is actually the neck of the femur, which is the large bone of the leg. So this patient had fractured her hip --not her neck. A quick anatomy lesson consoled both the patient and the account representative. Familiarize Yourself With Major Anatomic Terms Orthopedics is truly applied anatomy, which is simply the practical application of anatomical knowledge to diagnosis and treatment. That much we know from the story illustrated above. An understanding of the human anatomy will improve your orthopedic coding expertise one hundred fold. Don't let that statement deter you. You don't need to know the human anatomy from head to toe. You just have to know where to find the information about any given diagnosis. Bolster Coding With Bone Basics There are a total of 206 bones in the body -- 54 bones in the hands and 52 in the feet. You don't need to memorize every one of those bones to code correctly. You just need to know where to find the pertinent information when called on to code diagnoses and conditions in every area of the body. A pictorial skeleton with all [...]