Wiki Acute vs Chronic conditions

[Ladamato13]

Hello! I am a fairly new coder and I am working for a company where I do mostly Radiology coding. We are having some conflict about coding a condition that is unspecified as acute or chronic. I was taught in school and my co-workers were under the impression that if a condition is unspecified, we automatically code it as acute, unless it is specifically stated as chronic. I was just putting this out there to all of you to see what you were taught and you have been doing. If anyone has a link to a official guideline on this topic I would really appreciate if you could post it because I can't find an ICD-9 guideline on this. Thank you very much in advance!

 

[Pam Warren]

There are lots of guidelines with regards to acute/chronic, specific to many conditions. You would want to look at the AHA coding clinic to make sure that you are following the correct guidelines, and not assume that you'd assign one over the other.

As a general rule, however, if a condition is not specified as acute or chronic, you would not report acute. You'd report the NOS code, or whichever code in the alpha index supports not specified, after verifying in the tabular index that you're not being directed to another code. I also wouldn't automatically code the chronic unless the tabular index tells you to do so. Again, I'd defer to the NOS code in the alpha index, and verify in the tabular index that there are not other conventions to use.

Do you have an example?