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Change is something inevitable and the present development in all aspects of our lives is a solid evidence on how fast our world is evolving and how true the adage is. These changes have been brought to us by unending human demands, needs for improvement, and desire to make things easier. With the inventions of Virtual Reality consoles, smartphones, and computer programs, and the discoveries of cures for previously incurable diseases, we can say that we are already living in the future.
So when the US finally decided to transition from the 36-year-old ICD-9 to ICD-10 in medical coding, everyone in medical field knew that the industry is up for something unprecedented.
The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is designed to promote international comparability in the collection, processing, classification, and presentation of mortality statistics. This includes providing a format for reporting causes of death on the death certificate. The reported conditions are then translated into medical codes through the classification structure and the selection and modification rules contained in the applicable revision of the ICD, published by the World Health Organization. These coding rules improve the usefulness of mortality statistics by giving preference to certain categories, consolidating conditions, and systematically selecting a single cause of death from a reported sequence of conditions. After encountering several pushback and hurdles, the United States has finally decided that some updating in the International Classification of Diseases necessary and has finally proceeded to adopt the ICD-10. The main goal of updating from ICD-9 to ICD-10 is to permit tracking of many new diagnoses and procedures. It is considerably a timely transition given the immense number of new codes that has been included in ICD-10.
The transition has been foreseen in the field of medical coding services given that it has already been used in other territories like Canada and Australia in the early 2000s. Having an ICD code system that lags behind the rest of the world may not depict the purpose of the ICD code system itself—to be an accurate and universal classification system for diseases. But due to the extremely large code set of the ICD-10, its implementation in the US has been frequently delayed. Regardless of the level of readiness of the majority of the medical coding community, ICD-10 is now the official standard tool for diagnostics for epidemiology, health management, and miscellaneous clinical purposes.
The transition period from ICD-9 to ICD-10 has lived up to its expected tediousness six months after it was launched. The good side of it is that the transition did not end up badly. Most of the early transition problems like the shortage of coders are now slowly being addressed. Even the AAPC and American Health Information Management Association are giving out training programs and certifications to maintain a high-quality of medical coding services in general.
This can be considered as a leap in the field of medical coding for the implementation of ICD-10 is an update that current times call for. The transition to ICD-10 is entering its second phase as of writing this article.
