Epileptic Seizure Diagnosis Coding

Epileptic Seizure Diagnosis Coding https://www.cco.us/medical-terminology-anatomy-medical-coders-course Alicia: This is a very good subject. I’ll try to rein myself in and not take too much time on this, but I found tons of information about epilepsy seizure coding. Q: Can I get opinions on the correct diagnosis coding for seizure (in an epileptic patient)? If final diagnosis code is seizure, but the patient also has epilepsy, should you code to 780.39 or go to the 345.xx series of codes? A: Well, I found an amazing study by this Dr. Barkley who is the Vice President of the National Association of Epilepsy Centers. He knew how to code, so that was obvious and that was very helpful when I wanted to explain this. We’ll start at the beginning, seizure, if you code a seizure at 780.39, what are you looking at? You’re looking at paroxysmal behavioral spell generally caused by an excessive disorderly discharge of cortical nerve cells in the brain. So, epileptic seizures can be clinically undetectable (electrographic seizures) to convulsions. We’ll see the signs and symptoms can vary. They depend on, first, what part of the brain is being affected. I could have pulled out all kinds of pictures of different type of things that they ask when a seizure happens where they have tonic-clonic seizures where you have lots of movement. My son has epilepsy and he has tonic-clonic seizures when he has one. Then, they have others that are just maybe a staring spell. The thing about that is sometimes people has seizure and you don’t even know because they mostly, they last less than one minute, right? Tonic-clonics don’t, they usually can last a little bit longer. But someone could have a seizure especially in children, you may not ever know it because it just may look like they’re looking out the window. Going on down talking more about not signs and symptoms, let’s talk about epilepsy-345. That’s where we’re talking about actually epilepsy. A syndrome of two or more unprovoked or recurrent seizures on more than one occasion – that’s how they determine that a person has epilepsy. So, you ultimately don’t have a reason to have a seizure; so if you have a seizure, one of the things they’re going to check is check to see if you have a fever because in children they’re usually febrile seizures, that’s what it was caused by. Or, they have an infection, do they have a UTI? Something like that. Read more here: https://www.cco.us/epileptic-seizure-diagnosis-coding-video/ Get more medical coding training, medical coding tips, medical coding certification and free medical coding webinars at https://www.cco.us/