Iron Out Wrinkles in Your Laceration Repair Coding

Know when — and when not — to add wound lengths

Need to fine-tune your skills at reporting laceration treatment in the ED?

See if you can correctly code this challenging scenario and home in on your coding trouble spots.

Scenario

A patient presents to the emergency department (ED) with a 1.5-cm laceration of the eyebrow, and the physician performs an intermediate repair. The patient also has a 3.6-cm forehead laceration that requires a simple repair. Should you add these two wound lengths together and then code the intermediate repair, or does each get its own code?

Answer

You should report 12051 (Layer closure of wounds of face, ears, eyelids, nose, lips and or mucous membranes; 2.5 cm or less) for the eyebrow repair and 12013 (Simple repair of superficial wounds of face, ears, eyelids, nose, lips and/or mucous membranes; 2.6 cm to 5.0 cm) for the forehead repair. Don’t sum the wound lengths — you should only combine or add the lengths of like wounds when they’re located in the same anatomical area and are of the same classification. In this case, you would report the intermediate wound separately from the simple closure, and append modifier -51 (Multiple procedures) only to the simple repair code.

Remember

You also need to report these two repairs separately because they are not the same type of repair — one is simple, and the other is intermediate. If they were both simple, or both intermediate, and located in the same anatomical area, then you would add their lengths together and report one repair code.

According to CPT,

When multiple wounds are repaired, add together the lengths of those in the same classification and from all anatomic sites that are grouped together into the same code descriptor.

The classifications that CPT refers to are “simple,” “intermediate” and “complex” repairs, says Yvonne Mayer, CPC, a Senior Coding Analyst with Bill Dunbar and Associates in Indianapolis.