How Much Do YOU Know About Debridement?

  Are you making the most appropriate clinical and coding choices? Take the Debridement Quiz and test your knowledge. Share your responses with TWC — we will publish compiled results in a future issue.

  Study the examples of wounds, debridement action taken, practitioner delivering care, and tissue removed. Assume the care facility is a hospital-owned outpatient wound department (HOPD). Then determine the type of debridement, documentation, and coding.

  Understand that in actual practice, you would have a great deal more information about the patient in your care — eg, medications, nutritional status, previous treatment, and vascular status. Also, the information given may not match the exact history of the patients in the pictures; it was compiled to illustrate particular scenarios.

  Discuss these cases with your clinical group. Then, please share your answers with TWC. Take a few moments to email your responses to our Editor at twc@hmpcommunications.com.

  Learn. We created this exercise to point out the daily challenges and often difficult choices we face in our clinics and to emphasize the ongoing need to critically examine each situation and make the best decision possible based on best-practice health and regulatory protocols. Although the patient stories may be manufactured, the opportunity to assess your level of debridement know-how is a valuable exercise, even for experienced clinicians. Now, pencils ready .... begin.