Medical Coding for Stroke Syndrome Code 436

Medical Coding for Stroke Syndrome Code 436 www.cco.us/ceu-endocrine-nervous-system-on-demand-…

This slide, everyone, actually came about when I had trouble with this code 436 stroke syndrome, because if you're not familiar with strokes it's really easy to get confused. So, real quick, let's go over what stroke syndrome is: a condition with sudden onset due to acute vascular lesions of the brain (hemorrhage, embolism, thrombosis, rupturing aneurysm), which maybe marked by hemiplegia or hemiparesis, vertigo, numbness, aphasia and dysarthria, and often followed by permanent neurologic damage.

You're saying, "Oh well that's a stroke." Now this is just stroke definition from the Mayo Clinic: a stroke occurs when the blood supply to part of the brain is interrupted or severely reduced depriving brain tissue of oxygen and food, within minutes, brain cells begin to die.

So, when you look at the difference in the two, the stroke is a sudden attack. Stroke syndrome is more about happens to the patient after they've had their stroke -- if that makes sense.

Knowing thing that, 436 -- when you go in and you pull that out of your code book, that's going to give you a list of things that are ill-defined as far as cerebrovascular disease. Now, that's different than a cerebrovascular accident because a cerebrovascular accident is acute. So this is cerebrovascular disease and that gives you a list of things that can happen. I've added the Excludes because that's really important, because see, the 434.91, that is a CVA or a cerebrovascular accident - meaning, it's acute. That just happened. Hemorrhages, thrombotic -- that means there's a thrombosis happening, an embolism stuff, there's codes for that.

There's a few more Excludes. When you're looking for your right code, you really want to research and make sure that there's no underlying Excludes in there. Pay attention to the parenthetical, the Includes and the Excludes because one word can make a huge difference in what you're coding.

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