Can someone please tell me when it is appropriate to code comorbidities for a specialist visit? We are being put on a lower fee schedule with Blue Cross of Idaho because we only code out what we treat . According to BCI, they want to see how sick our population is w additional dx codes if they are present and documented such as diabetes, htn etc……

We are a Neurosurgery office and have asked different sources how to code ICD 10 appropriately and have been given many contradicting answers stating that we should only code what we treat then we are also told that we need to include the co-morbidities even when we are seeing a patient for a specific reason. An example is- a patient with a disc that also has COPD that needs a hemilaminectomy and microdiscectomy to remove the disc problem. We would normally code this as 99205-57 M51.16. Should we add J44.9 for COPD?

Please help !!!!!

Thank you,

Stephanie