Friday, June 1, 2012

ICD-10 Codes

The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Revision (ICD-10), of 1992, is a medical classification list by the World Health Organization (WHO), for the coding of diseases, signs and symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or diseases. The code set allows more than 14,400 different codes and permits the tracking of many new diagnoses. Using optional subclassifications, the codes can be expanded to over 16,000 codes. Using codes that are meant to be reported in a separate data field, the level of detail that is reported by ICD can be further increased, using a simplified multiaxial approach.

The WHO provides detailed information about ICD online, and makes available a set of materials online, such as an ICD-10 online browser, ICD-10 Training, ICD-10 online training, ICD-10 online training support, and study guide materials for download.

The International version of ICD should not be confused with national Clinical Modifications of ICD that include frequently much more detail, and sometimes have separate sections for procedures. For instance, the US ICD-10 CM has some 68,000 codes. The US also has ICD-10 PCS a procedure code system not used by other countries that contains 76,000 codes.

Work on ICD-10 began in 1983 and was completed in 1992.

Some 25 countries use ICD-10 for reimbursement and resource allocation in their health system. A few of them made modifications to ICD to better accommodate this use of ICD-10. The article below makes reference to some of these modifications. The unchanged international version of ICD-10 is used in about 110 countries ICD-10 for cause of death reporting and statistics.

The United States will begin official use of ICD-10 on October 1, 2014, using Clinical Modification ICD-10-CM for diagnosis coding and Procedure Coding System ICD-10-PCS for inpatient hospital procedure coding. All HIPAA "covered entities" must make the change; a pre-requisite to ICD-10 is the adoption of EDI Version 5010 by January 1, 2012. Enforcement of 5010 transition by CMS, however, was postponed by CMS until March 31, 2012, with the federal agency citing numerous factors, including slow software upgrades. The implementation of ICD-10 has already been delayed. In January 2009, the date was pushed back by two years, to October 1, 2013 rather than a prior proposal of October 1, 2011