Can an audiologist use a medical diagnosis code such as otitis media, if this is what he suspected?
No. What we are doing is we are measuring and evaluating function. We are not determining through our testing the medical etiology of the problem and so our primary diagnosis codes must be a functional diagnosis code describing what is their balance, what is their hearing, whatever. It can be the balance family, it can be a 388 for related auditory symptoms and perception, 389 for hearing loss. But it’s got to be related to function as opposed to a medical diagnosis. How specific do we need to be in our overall diagnostic coding such as 389.10, 11 or 12? You can be as specific as your test results will allow you to be. If you have someone who is 82 years old and has a sloping sensorineural hearing loss, you’re not really sure just on the basis of a routine audio whether that is a sensory loss or neural loss or combined, and for me if I were doing it, I would code a 389.10 for combined sensory and neural hearing loss representation. For someone with acute noise trauma, high frequency he
