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ICD9CM Billing, A Better Understanding

By John Miller


In the world of medicine you have to follow a certain rules in order to come up with anything, you cannot simply do it via guessing. ICD9CM billing is a coding system that hold codes that are going to be sued in describing diagnosis in patients. Like what were the symptoms present and what was the reason for it, was it a disease or perhaps a disorder.

In medical offices, it is their way of keeping track of medical history records. This includes the date and time of a visit from patient and the reason behind the visit. All of this are used for their insurance. They need to do this accurately for the quality to remain the same, doctors will not be charge with medical malpractices, and reimbursement from insurances is met.

The initials ICD9 stands for International Classification of Disease, ninth revision and are being referred as the diagnosis codes. Coding is considered as universal and standard for the system. The purpose is to be able to identify different kinds of diseases. Know that it has three up to five digits only.

The codes which are submitted for insurance claim purposes are associated with a CPT code to be able to indicate which of the procedures is associated with either a symptom or a disease. You see, there could be more than one ICD 9 code in every CPT. While the CMS form on the other hand can accommodate a maximum of 4 codes in form with twenty one boxes.

At first, you will have a hard time in understanding and could be confusing of course. You might decide to give up, but not knowing anything is even more frustrating. It has three volumes, the first two contains diagnostic information both used in billing and by physicians.

The volume 3 on the other hand which was just released not long ago contains all the procedural information for the process of hospital billing, which can be seen in a separate manual. You cannot understand all this if you will not read the first two volumes first. So, start there before proceeding to this part.

Keep in mind that volume 1 must be in a numerical form, 2 is in alphabetical, while 3 needs to be both, alphabetical and numeric. Formatting needs to be done manually with the use of a special formatting. When you use that, identifying the right codes becomes easy. That format is called conventions.

There will be some abbreviations present you will encounter along the way. Take note that NEC stands for not elsewhere classifiable while NOS is for not otherwise specified. There are also color codes, blue means you will not able to use it as primary diagnosis, yellow for having not enough information present, while gray for another code.

For the formats, when there are main terms it should be in bold letters. Put a bracket for synonyms and alternative words. For sub terms put some indention and have it italicize for supplemental. Bullet points indicate that there is a new code present. Surely, you at least have learned something by reading this article.




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