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Post operative diagnosis chronic sinusitis and chronic nasal obstruction with severe nasal septum deviation and bilateral inferior turbinate hypertrophy.Operation performed septoplasty, bilateral partial resection of inferior turbinates, bilateral middle meatal antrostomy with debridement of maxillary sinuses, bilateral anterior posterior ethmoidectomy with debridement of ethmoid sinuses, bilateral sphenoidotomy and uncinectomy. My questions are: 1. Do you code the uncinectomy? 2. Is there a code for this?We have only started to see this term used. The codes for all the procedures are straight forward except this.

Uncinectomy (aka Infundibulotomy) involves detachment and removal of the anterior, inferior and superior attachments of the uncinate process. It is performed as part of an intranasal ethmoidectomy in order to gain access to the ethmoid infundibulum, expose the frontal recess and allow visualisation of the frontal recess.
Uncinectomy is a fundamental step in functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS).

Therefore, for the case cited, it is unnecessary to code the 'uncinectomy' component of the procedure.

The NCCH will review the indexing of this procedure and ACS 0807 Functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS) for a future edition of ICD-10-AM.