bhavana...
I fell into that trap too.
However, unless there is a specific
type of arthritis, Coding Clinic 2016, 4th quarter, instructs us to default to "osteoarthritis", M19.--. M46 category is Inflammatory spondylopathy category...which we couldn't select from unless the physician actually documented "inflammatory arthritis/spondylopathy"...even though it looks like that is the coding path in the ICD-10 index. So, in the absence of further verbiage of "inflammatory", and only having the term
arthritis, I would follow Coding Clinic guidance and select a code from the M19.-- category. As thomas7331 has shown, if you have the term "
arthropathy" documented, you can follow the path in ICD-10 index and get to M12.88. I've pasted the Coding Clinic, and a snip from the Coders Desk Reference. It's all in the verbiage, and believe me, I had to study this for a while!
Rhonda Winder, CPC, CPMA, CRC