ICD-10 Basics

Organizational Awareness Video Highlights latest NYP ICD-10 Readiness Efforts

Jason Gottlieb

On Tuesday, August 11, NYP, in its ongoing efforts to create an ICD-10 informed and insulated organization, will release its ICD-10 organizational awareness video in the NYP Learning Center.  This video, assigned to all NYP employees’ transcripts, will explain the ICD-10 diagnosis and procedure coding system, its benefits, and how it may potentially affect your role at NYP.

On October 1, 2015 the United States and NYP will begin to describe the conditions of our patients and the services we provide to treat those conditions using a new healthcare language called ICD-10.  The WORK we collectively do, the CARE we collectively provide, the GOALS we collaboratively strive to achieve, and the INITIATIVES we participate in to achieve them are all impacted in some way by ICD-10.

ICD-10 IS how we communicate to the outside world the acuity, complexity, the diversity of our patients.  ICD-10 IS how we describe the SUPERIOR, HIGH QUALITY care that each of you provide every day.  ICD-10 IS how we will be rewarded for that care in the form of payment from third party.

Please enjoy this video as NYP and the healthcare industry complete the transition to ICD-10.

 

ICD-10: Defining Clearer Boundaries

Doug Zweibel

by Rhonda Butler, senior clinical research analyst with 3M Health Information Systems.

See full article here

What makes a species distinct enough that it gets its own unique name?  Like any classification system, Linnaeus’ conceptual framework for organizing and naming living things is an exercise in drawing boundaries.  Similar things are grouped together, initially by laying out general boundaries—is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?—and making progressively finer distinctions.

All classification systems work in basically the same way, because all classification systems are products of the human mind. Classification is a profoundly human endeavor. We invent systems that allow us to organize and codify our understanding of the world and ourselves.

ICD-10 is a classification system for understanding the ways our own bodies can break or be broken, and what we can do to try and fix them. ICD-10 has more codes than ICD-9 simply because it makes finer distinctions.

To the extent possible, classification systems try to ask for the same amount of detail in drawing a next level boundary. Often this is depicted in graphic form like a tree structure—the kind of thing we see in a company’s org charts all the time. As it evolved with each annual update, ICD-9 did not make a serious attempt to be systematic in the detail it added, or consistent in the types of information it classified to the same level boundary.

ICD-10 is both systematic in its application of detail and consistent in the type of information it classifies to the same level boundary. For example, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) asked the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) to add detail to ICD-10 that tells them whether a pregnant woman is in the first, second or third trimester of her pregnancy. So that information about trimester of pregnancy was added systematically to the obstetrics branch of the ICD-10 tree.

Systematic and complete application of detail to an entire branch of a classification system obviously increases the number of codes by a factor of the amount of meaningful detail—three trimesters = three times as many pregnancy diagnosis codes.

And that is of course the point of any good classification, to draw boundaries that are meaningful to the people in that field. Imagine telling ACOG that all trimesters are the same, that the information they asked for in ICD-10 is unnecessary and a burden to physicians, and that they can track quality, outcomes, and do sophisticated clinical research without knowing the trimester of the patient. Maybe the opponents of ICD-10 can tell them.

The Difference between ICD-9 and ICD-10 Codes

Alex Hass

ICD-10 codes differ from ICD-9 codes in their basic form and structure, which is good news for anyone who needs to be able to differentiate between the two without being familiar with individual codes.  ICD-10 codes tend to be longer than ICD-9 codes and to have more flexibility as to whether characters can be numbers or letters.  See below for additional details.

ICD-9 diagnosis codes have 3-5 characters. The characters are all numbers, except for supplementary codes – V and E codes.

ICD-10 diagnosis codes have 3-7 characters.  The first character is always a letter, and the rest can be letters or numbers.

ICD10

ICD-9 Example

 Training_icd9_example

ICD-10 Example

Training_icd10_conversionV2

What is ICD and ICD-10?

Rachel Tornheim

What is ICD? 

ICD stands for International Classification of Diseases.  This classification, which is developed by the World Health Organization, consists of a set of diagnosis codes, which describe what is wrong with a given patient, and a set of procedure codes, which describe the various tests and treatments that we use to understand and treat their condition.

What is ICD used for?

The diagnosis and procedure codes that are part of ICD are used for billing purposes, both to help providers check whether certain procedures were needed given a patient’s ailment (medical necessity checking), and to determine how much a provider should be paid for treating a given patient.

What is ICD-10?

ICD-10 is the 10th iteration of the International Classification of Diseases.

Why does the International Classification of Diseases need to be updated?

With advances in science, the discovery of new diseases, the development of new tests and treatments, and changing needs for data to inform outcomes research, each iteration of the ICD codes becomes obsolete over time.  ICD-9 has been in place for over 30 years.