Urology Coding Alert
You'll Be Implementing These Code Updates for Prostate Conditions in October
Plus: Infection and inflammatory reaction choices have numerous changes.
With the first official round of ICD-10 updates going into effect on Oct. 1, it’s crucial to spend the next two months preparing for the changes that will affect your practice most. Read on for the scoop on three more diagnostic areas of that are important parts of your claims.
Watch Your Wording for Prostate Conditions
You’ll find revisions, deletions, and new additions to codes for several prostate disorders. Three revisions of importance include:
“The term ‘benign prostatic hyperplasia’ indicates a more specific enlargement of the prostate gland,” explains Michael A. Ferragamo, MD, FACS, clinical assistant professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “This terminology distinguishes this enlargement from other causes of prostatic enlargement such a cancer of the prostate gland (C61,) acute and chronic inflammation and infection of the prostate gland (N41.0 or N41.1), or a prostatic abscess (N41.2), to name a few.”
One prostatic code will be deleted and replaced by several codes with more detailed descriptors.
Delete N42.3 (Dysplasia of prostate) and choose from:
Next, say good-bye to N50.8 (Other specified disorders of male genital organs). Eight new, specific ICD-10 codes will take its place:
Change One Word in Implant and Graft Problem Descriptors
Although the majority of patients who have genitourinary prosthetic devices don’t experience problems, you need to be ready to report any complicating issues with as many details as possible. ICD-10’s coming update will help you do that by specifying that the device or implant caused the problem.
The affected codes as they currently stand are:
The change: Each of these descriptors and the associated ones in the code families will replace “of” or “from” with the phrase “due to.” For example, T83.81X~ will be “Embolism due to genitourinary prosthetic devices, implants and grafts …” effective Oct. 1.
Also: You’ll continue to have individual codes for each of these situations based on the encounter status. Choose A (Initial encounter), D (Subsequent encounter), or S (Sequela) for the seventh digit as appropriate.
As Ferragamo points out, the shift from “of” or “from” to “due to” fortifies and clarifies the causal relationship of the complicating events.
Prepare to Overhaul Infection and Inflammatory Reaction Choices
When a patient experiences an infection and inflammatory reaction due to catheters or other devices, you’ll be able to report more detailed diagnoses than ever before.
As with the implant and graft codes mentioned above, these code groups have individual diagnoses for initial, subsequent, and sequela encounters. The new base codes you’ll be adding to your ICD-10 choices are:
The related codes T83.51X~ (Infection and inflammatory reaction due to indwelling urinary catheter …) will be deleted effective Oct. 1, 2016.
Implanted devices will also have many more reporting options, including:
ICD-10 will delete two code groups because of the new additions:
Note: With diagnostic coding, the word “and” in the various diagnostic descriptive ICD-10 codes means “and” or “or.” Therefore, you can separate out whether the diagnosis represents inflammation or infection or both.
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