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Radiology Coding Alert

You Be the Coder:

Organ Transplant Screening

Published on Mon Nov 08, 2004

Question: Which ICD-9 Code should I use when screening a patient before a heart transplant for myocardial degeneration? We usually perform a chest x-ray as the screening test.

Louisiana Subscriber

Answer: You will need to report a V code as the primary diagnosis code, but you can include the organ failure as a secondary diagnosis code for the recipient.

Use V code V72.83 (Other specified preoperative examination) for your primary diagnosis. Then, because you are doing a workup for a heart transplant patient, report the most specific diagnosis code you can for heart failure. In this example, you will use ICD-9 code 429.1 (Myocardial degeneration).

In organ transplantation that uses organs or portions of organs from living donors, the donor may also undergo imaging preoperative tests. In such cases the underlying organ failure of the proposed recipient should NOT be reported.
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