PERITONEAL ADHESIOLYSIS WITH CC DRG Code 336

CMS won’t budge on excluding muscle weakness. While Medicare officials made some tweaks to PDGM’s diagnosis codes, most of them remained as-is — including some top codes frequently used by home health agencies. Numerous commenters on the 2020 proposed rule [...]

Get to know how these new CMS proposed rules might affect your practice. Fee schedule changes to most evaluation and management (E/M) services have been relatively safe from CMS intervention over the past few years. As for 2019, however, it’s [...]

Hint: Proposal causes one pulmonary practice in our sample to lose $93,000 in one year. Pulmonology practices have been able to rest easy during the past few years’ worth of fee schedule changes, but this year may have thrown a [...]

Market consolidation on a large scale announced. Two of the original "Big Four" publicly traded home care companies soon will become one, pending shareholder and regulatory approval. Lafayette, Louisiana-based LHC Group Inc. and Louisville, Kentucky-based Almost Family Inc. "have agreed [...]

Question: How can we report the diagnosis of lumbar epidural hematoma? The physician does not mention any evidence of trauma in the clinical note. Alaska Subscriber Answer: Since your physician does not mention traumatic etiology for the epidural hematoma, identifying a specific [...]

Question: Please suggest ICD-9 diagnosis code for thoracic epidural mass with compression of spinal cord. The patient has a history of thymoma. New Hampshire Subscriber  Answer: For the epidural mass, the best diagnosis code is 239.7 (Neoplasm of unspecified nature of endocrine [...]

One moratorium area has twice as many agencies per bene. Home health agencies’ own claims data is what is hanging them in moratorium areas. These are the 2012 stats the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services used to help determine [...]

Question: Our surgeon performed complete laminectomy for decompression of dura at L2 where lumbar epidural hematoma was present. What would be the diagnosis code for lumbar epidural hematoma and the CPT® code for laminectomy? Alaska Subscriber Answer: You report code [...]

Question: What is the ICD 9 code for lumbar subdural hematoma?Missouri SubscriberAnswer: There is no specific diagnostic code for a spinal subdural hematoma. You may report a lumbar subdural hematoma with code 336.1 (Vascular myelopathies). However, the lumbar subdural hematoma [...]

70370, 70371 edit teaches the importance of checking additions and deletions. Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) version 17.2, which took effect July 1, offers 2,367 new edit pairs and deletes 336 bundles, according to an analysis by Frank Cohen, MPA, MBB, [...]