Welcome to the Medicoder Wiki[]
A wiki for bridging common medical terminologies to ICD and CPT coding for medical professionals.
USE the SEARCH BOX in upper right corner of this page for any disease conditions, procedures, or medical codes (ICD-9, ICD-10, CPT codes).
CONTRIBUTE. Missing an article on the topic you are searching? Know something about a topic that you would like to contribute. Please feel free to click "CONTRIBUTE" on the upper right corner and add a page.
Don't feel like starting a whole new page? Just has a tid-bit to add to the discussion? Use the Comment section, and your comments will be incorporated into the main articles as the discussions shape up.
Describe your website[]
Testing Wiki for a later full version.
What it is:
A place for medical professionals to find ICD codes for a particular CPT code. and vise versa.
To find a medical conditions associated with a procedure, and vise versa.
To share advice on each entry's coding, and coding advice in general.
Get basic information about conditions and procedures.
What it isn't:
This is NOT meant to be an indepth wiki of medical conditions themselves, i.e. etiology, epidemiology, treament, medical trials.
This is NOT meant for patients to find medical information.
This is ONLY meant to be a bridge between commonly used terminologies and those defined by ICD and CPT codes.
This is NOT meant to be substitute for professional advice in coding.
There are two basic kinds of articles. The Free Articles, are articles with titled by medical conditions or procedures, i.e. appendisitis or gastric bypass, and are without any pre-fixes. They are for general discussion of the subject matter, and diamibuation of any multitude of codes that made be related to the subject. The second type of articles, the Reference Articles, take on the form of CPT:XXXXX or ICD9:XXXXX. They are usually pre-fixed by the type of the code or reference. They are official data transferred directly from government's official databases, and broken down into individual articles. There are discussion areas at the end of these articles as well, but we strongly recommend to limit discussion to the particular Code that article refers to. For example, if there is a particular issue worth clarifying about billing a CPT code XXXXX, then that is discussed in the "Discussion" section of the article CPT:XXXXX. But if one wants to discuss about an issue how to choose among several CPT codes for a procedure, for example an appendectomy that may be coded deferently depending on the approach, then that disucssion takes place in the "Discussion" section of the article "Appendectomy". The idea is that overtime, the Free Articles will evolve into the main repository of the community's wisdom, while the reference articles are mainly to lend support with objective data.
Background[]
The current landscape of medical coding in the U.S. is complex. Essentially it is an endproduce of a struggle between the effort to conform to international standard on one hand, and satisfying domestic practicalities on the other.
The International effort is represented by the WHO's ICD codes. While ICD-10 has been adopted internationally for more than a decade, (with ICD-11 coming in 2015), the U.S. has stayed with ICD-9. ICD-9 was adopted by the US as ICD-CM (CM standing for Clinical Modifications), with volume 1 and 2 staright from ICD-9 covering diagnosis, and volume 3 is a set of procedure codes that's unique to to ICD-9 CM, and absent in the original, "inernational" version of ICD-9. It is therefore quite interesting that domestic arguments in favor of using the CPT code set instead has been that the ICD-9 code was an "international" product, when infact the procedural code portion was developed by the U.S., for the U.S., with our own tax dollars. ICD-10 is slated to be adopted in the early 2010's, with the analogous US adoptation called ICD-10-CM, with the procedural portion ICD-10-PCS replacing volume 3 of ICD-9-CM. ICD-10-PCS was developed by 3M at the request of the US government, and is an uniquely complex codeset with no direct coorspondance to CPT codes.
The domestic effort in coding conformitiy is largely represented by the HCPCS ("hic picks") from the US government. As it is tied to how medicare/medicaide dollars are dispensed, it is soley focused on procedures and products. Level 1 portion of HCPCS is for procedure, and is the same as the CPT code administered by the AMA, while level 2 is over products and other services and administered by the government (CMS) directly. Level 2 is freely available at the CMS website. Level 1 is not. The CPT code is a copyrighted product of AMA. Publications by the AMA explaining the CPT codes are also commerical products. However, LCD's which are CMS rules and clarifications on various codes, are still freely available.
Therefore the current landscape is of rapid shifts in diagnostic codes on one hand, driving by pressure to update to international standard, and a firmly entrenched procedural codes protected by the priviliedged position of the CPT code, which is unlikely to change in the near future. Competing procedural codes such as ICD-9-CM volume 3, and ICD-10-PCS are present, but not favored to be adopted in any meaningful way in term of commericial use. For the sake of simplicity, this website will refer to the ICD-9-CM as "ICD-9" codes, and similarly for ICD-10. The procedural codesets of the ICD's will not be the focus for now. Instead Medicoder will focus mainly on the interplay of ICD-9 and CPT codes, as it is the crust of coding issues facing healthcare professionals at the current time.
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