The Perfect Father’s Day Gift: A Prostate Screening

Men’s Health Month: Focus on Prostate Screening
By Dr. Jon Elion, MD, FACC and Founder/President of ChartWise Medical Systems. This post first appeared in ChartWise2.0 on Jun 16, 2016 in honor of Men’s Health Month.
June is Men’s Health Month, when we focus on prevention, detection, and treatment of disease in men and boys. As a cardiologist, it is tempting for me to use this platform to talk about heart disease. Instead I have decided to push myself beyond that, connecting to my cardiology roots while shooting for some extra bonus points by mentioning coding and Clinical Documentation Improvement.
I saw a patient in the office for follow-up two weeks after an acute inferior MI caused by a right coronary artery occlusion (that would be ICD-10 code I2.11). Remember that the meaning of “initial” and “subsequent” for MIs has changed since ICD-9, where it referred to the episode of care. But under ICD-10, this office visit for the single MI within the previous 4 weeks did not get any special code modifier. As he was leaving, the patient asked me to check his PSA (the Prostate-Specific Antigen which is used to help detect and screen for prostate cancer). Apparently his family doctor normally did this, but it hadn’t been checked in a while. He called a few weeks later to tell me that his insurance company refused to pay for the PSA check, as the test is not indicated in the context of a follow up visit after a heart attack. It would have been cove...

Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - June 17, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Men's Health Uncategorized Source Type: blogs