ICD-10 Updates: A Burn May Be Corrosion Under the Soon-To-Go-Into Effect Code Set

The new diagnosis coding system will allow your surgeon to make a distinction.

When you start using ICD-10 in October 2013, reporting burns by body site/ ‘degree’ plus an additional code for total body surface area (TBSA) won’t change. However, reporting the cause of the burn will.

Changes ICD-10 will bring to burn source

In ICD-9, a burn is a burn; however under ICD-10, a burn may be a corrosion, which is a chemical burn and the new diagnosis coding system will allow your surgeon to make a distinction.

Here’s an Instance:

A patient has a second degree burn of the right thigh from accidentally spilling boiling water. Under the present code system, you would report the condition as 945.26 whereas under ICD-10, you need to list T24.211.

Now let us say you have the exact scenario, except the burn is from an accidental spill of a strong acid. With the present code system, you’d still go for 945.26. However, you’ll use T24.611- (Corrosion of second degree of right thigh) for ICD-10.

ICD-10 helps you zoom in on body site more specifically than the current code set. ICD-10 provides distinct codes for you to report bilateral body sites as right, left or unspecified.

Additional codes

Just like ICD-9, you will need to list a distinct ICD-10 code pointing to the extent of burns (or corrosions) using a unique TBSA code.

Say for instance in ICD-9, you would go for 948.10. But after 2013, you will have two TBSA choices based on the burn/corrosion distinction: T31.10, T32.10.

Corrosion codes in ICD-10: After 2013, not only do you have different corrosion codes in the soon-to-go-into effect ICD-10 code set , you also need to report a unique code to determine the cause of the chemical burn. ICD-10 provides this instruction: Code first: (T51-T65) to identify chemical and intent preceding the corrosion codes.