Sepsis

By Dr. Santosh Guptha · MEDESUN Global Sepsis is one of the most consequential diagnoses in American medicine. It is a leading cause of in-hospital death, one of the costliest conditions hospitals treat, and the focus of national quality programs like SEP-1. It also sits at the center of the antimicrobial-resistance crisis. If there is one place where the precision of our coding system has life-and-death and dollar-and-cent consequences, sepsis is it. And it is exactly here that ICD-10-CM shows its age. The problem: ICD-10-CM makes sepsis hard Ask any inpatient coder which diagnosis causes the most queries, the most audits, and the most sleepless nights, and sepsis will be near the top. The reason is structural. In ICD-10-CM, a single septic episode is rarely a single code. You assemble it from pieces, under strict sequencing rules: the underlying systemic infection by organism — for example, A41.51 for E. coli […]