Anesthesia Coding Alert

ICD-10 eliminates malignant/benign dilemma for hypertensive heart disease.When coding for procedures involving patients with hypertensive heart disease, you currently need to know whether the disease is malignant or benign and whether the patient experienced heart failure. That will change after ICD-10 implementation, so familiarize yourself with the coding differences now. The diagnosis: In hypertensive heart disease, hypertension leads to heart disease. As the current ICD-9 codes indicate, heart failure may or may not be present: 402.0x, Hypertensive heart disease; malignant 402.1x, Hypertensive heart disease; benign 402.9x, Hypertensive heart disease; unspecifiedYou also have two fifth-digit options:0, ... without heart failure 1, ... with heart failureICD-9 coding rules: The terms "benign" and "malignant" in the ICD-9 hypertensive heart disease codes can cause problems. If physicians don't include those terms in their hypertension documentation, coders are left with an "unspecified" code as the only compliant option. A second coding requirement for ICD-9 is that [...]