Neurosurgery Coding Alert

Ask your surgeon for precise documentation and narrow down to the right code.When your surgeon treats headaches after a fall, another trauma, without or without evident open injuries, or after fracture(s) in the skull, you'll need to know how to report these accurately. Take the pain out of your headache choices with this overview of the codes you'll use hen ICD-10 is implemented. For a headache that your patient develops after a closed injury to the skull, as in concussion, you report code 310.2 (Postconcussion syndrome). This code in ICD-10 will map to F07.81 (Postconcussional syndrome)"This type of headache can persist for weeks or months after a traumatic head injury," says Gregory Przybylski, MD, director of neurosurgery, New Jersey Neuroscience Institute, JFK Medical Center, Edison. You may also report code V15.5 (Personal history of injury presenting hazards to health) if the patient is reported to develop headache after an injury.In [...]