Medical Coding Tips-- Coding Surgery

Medical Coding Tips– Coding Surgical Procedure https://www.cco.us/

This one is type of a brief one.

Q: Coding Surgery– I was questioning if somebody could give me a couple of suggestions on how to determine the wording when coding a surgical procedure? I have the research study guide but the concerns that they ask without the multiple answers are where I do not know what to try to find. I truly value any assistance you might have. Thanks, Mary.

A: When you take a coding course, you normally begin off with a couple of words, like, Ebola and you go look it up in the index. You might get a little circumstance, a little blip, and then you get genuine report, the kind of code. For the many part, you go and you speak with a variety of codes and you look at those codes and you compare them and you contrast them and you see which one finest fits your documents.
Doctor education, coders get involved in it.

This is a normal design. We got the client’s name and address– their demographics– their name, the date. This is where you wish to begin, you do not wish to just code here. These three things: preoperative, postoperative, and procedure– these are the diagnostic and procedural statements that you will be starting your coding from. So, I believe the concern was focused more on the treatment, so I’ll focus on that.

The medical professionals do not give you CPT code. You go to the index and you look up most likely “blepharoplasty, upper cover” and you come up with your code and you may find that there’s one or two, or possibly three different types of blepharoplasty codes. They call it abstracting, you’re abstracting the details that you require to get the proper code.
Now, you do check out the op report to see if there’s anything extra that the doctor did that you should code. Where your ability can be found in, as you start to find out things, like, an oophorectomy (removing an ovary); then, you see “Oh, they did a laparotomy. I need to code that.” But what you learned in coding is– no, you do not code the technique, you do not code the path to arrive. They opened the abdominal area, “laparo,”? And to get to the ovary, you remove it, the oophorectomy; then, you don’t code the laparotomy. It’s bundled in. As you read the story, that’s what you’re skimming for, just coding some extra stuff. If you discover that, then you proceed and code it.

Now, you could proceed and code it and after that possibly pop it into a CCI checker, which that’s the Correct Coding Initiative. It’s where they basically tell you if the Medicare considers the two codes bundled, where one is bundled into the other. And that’s how you find out. This is really what we do in our practicum course, we use Practicode as the background for the course and you code live cases like this. You log in as if you’re a remote coder, and on the left-hand side you’ve got your note and your demographics on the top, they’re made up obviously because it’s practice. And after that on the right-hand side, you have actually got a box to pop-in your medical diagnosis codes and your procedure codes. Then, you hit submit.

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