As Thanksgiving approaches and you prepare to gather with family, eat platefuls of turkey and delectable sides and perhaps avoid a thorny conversation about politics or another blood-boiling topic du jour, don't forget to consider your most amicable diagnosis coding set.
As you can see, ICD-10 codes are not only appropriate to describe patient encounters. They also can guide you through the joys and perils of close encounters with the family kind.
Assuredly, everyone will have a reason to consider
R63.2 (Polyphagia) as they sit around the table and will themselves to finish that last leg of turkey or dive into a second helping of pumpkin pie. "Polyphagia is a disorder of excessing eating, in which the patient has an impulse to eat abnormally large amounts of food," states the trusty
SelectCoder application.
But before bellying up to the table and filling your plate with a delicious mountain of gravy-decked succulence, you may have to navigate other minefields. Let's hope you can avoid a W61.42 (Struck by turkey) diagnosis, and that only a few really-out-of-luck among you will have to call in a W61.42XD (Struck by turkey, subsequent encounter). That would be one impertinent bird. Of course, those of us who feel the call of nature and choose to take things into their own hands need to keep a W61.43 (Pecked by turkey) in their back pocket.
If you've managed to avoid any striking and pecking calamities, don't get too comfortable. There's always a W27.4 (Contact with kitchen utensil) lurking near the cutting board. Let's hope you can avoid the seventh-character "D" on this one, as well as the "clarifying term" of an ice-pick that runs with the code description. If you do get bloodied and bruised of your own account, you may soon be uncorking an F10.1 (Alcohol abuse) and, soon after, another bottle of red.
Of course, that's maybe expected, should the conversation veer to anything other than the temperature of the oven or how good the third bottle of wine tastes. Just remember that there's a code for the conversation-avoiders who still get riled up during the latest political topic -- go with R45.4 (Irritability and anger). And then, after the pie and the dishes, a new band-aid and some more wine, chalk up any further details under the Y93.84 (Activity, sleeping) category.
Or, if it all stresses you out too much, you can avoid the whole shebang and take a break from your irascible uncle and get out of town. Just don't forget to drop Z75.5 (Holiday relief care) when you leave.