Onco Professional Services provides Management, Quality Control, Abstracting, Casefinding, and Follow-Up to help facilities achieve their goals. Periodically, our Onco Professional Services Staff share education and training documents internally on various topics related to the Cancer Registry; we call these bite-sized educational topics, “Did You Knows?”. Did You Knows are a valuable resource for our team, helping our staff stay up to date on registry-related topics. Going forward, we will share some of these via our blog periodically. We hope you find them as beneficial as our team does.
Background: Coding placement of an Intrauterine device (IUD) as treatment for early-stage uterine cancer can be easily missed. Today’s “Did You Know” will address the coding for an IUD.
Did You Know: Coding IUD as treatment for early-stage uterine cancer
Information: According to the SEER*Rx Database: “Intrauterine devices (IUDs) – used to prevent pregnancy – may also be an effective treatment for some patients with early-stage uterine cancer who want to preserve their fertility. In a small, early study (2010), carefully selected patients with cancer that had not spread beyond the inner lining of the uterus were treated with IUDs that released the hormone progesterone. The treatment was found to be as effective as oral hormone therapy, which is the most widely used nonsurgical, fertility-sparing treatment for the cancer. It is important to note that this treatment has not received final FDA approval but may still be prescribed off-label. If the physician states it is prescribed to shrink the cancer then code as Other treatment. If given to control bleeding consider it palliative treatment.”
Coding Instructions: Mirena IUD is not a FDA approved treatment for stage I endometrial cancer. It has been used in various clinical trials with questionable results. Code the treatment in “Other Therapy” and assign code 1: patient received a hormone therapy that could not be coded to hormone.
Reference(s):
SEER Rx
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