Coding Clinic for CDI: A season for football, pumpkin lattes, and Coding Clinic releases

By Laurie L. Prescott, RN, MSN, CCDS, CCDS-O, CDIP, CRC

It’s fall—a season for football and pumpkin lattes. That means it’s also time for the Third and Fourth Quarter American Hospital Association (AHA) Coding Clinic releases. Both were released on the same day and, because one can only take so much excitement, I will only speak to the Third Quarter release in this column. I tend to read magazines backwards, so we are going to start with the clarifications and corrections first.

Clarifications and corrections
The Coding Clinic Editorial Advisory Board corrected advice given a year ago related to assignment of the J18.1 code classifying lobar pneumonia, unspecified organism. Citing that lobar pneumonia is a clinical diagnosis typically involving consolidation of an entire lobe rather than infiltrates within a lobe, J18.1 should only be assigned when provider documentation specifically documents “lobar pneumonia,” according to the release. We are no longer to assign code J18.1, Lobar pneumonia, unspecified organism, when the provider documents pneumonia of the “right upper lobe” and the causal organism is not documented.