Though hospice has only been around since 1983, the number of Medicare recipients receiving these services has nearly tripled since then, growing to a full 1.5 million in 2017. In these 35 years, hospice principal diagnoses have changed dramatically. In the early 2000s, lung cancer was the most frequently reported condition. As recently as 2013, two of the top ten diagnoses were simply “adult failure to thrive” and “debility,” though these conditions lost their principal diagnosis status the next year in 2014.

With these conditions and others dropping in and out of use, the hospice principal diagnoses list has changed significantly in recent years. According to AAPC, the following 20 conditions were the most common as of 2017. These conditions, their corresponding ICD-10 codes, and the percentage of total hospice principal diagnoses that they comprise are all listed below.

If you code hospice patients, be sure to review these hospice principal diagnoses and commit them to memory, as they will almost certainly be the most common codes you use.