The US National Center for Health Statistics has developed a tenth revision clinical modification of how diagnosing diseases will be classified. The ICD Diagnosis Codes List is a new standard diagnostic tool for use in analysis of general health conditions of all sorts. While every medical facility or those who are connected in some way to the medical field will be using this coding system to classify their patients' medical condition, the World Health Organization (WHO) will use the data coded to gain a picture of the prevalence of diseases and other health issues globally. The information they collect will be able to give them a better picture of the overall health conditions of each country and population group around the world.

Who Will Use the List?

Primarily, the list will be used by physicians, nurses, researchers, insurance companies, and other health care providers but it will also be used by health information managers, and medical coders, technology workers, policy makers, and patient organizations to classify health conditions, record vital data, and create clinical, epidemiological reports. The data collected and coded using the ICD 10 Diagnosis Codes List will be used to compile national mortality rates and statistics by members of the WHO Member States.

Forms:

Many are concerned about the forms needed for the new medical coding that is now to be in place. Because the new coding is more expansive than the original ICD-9, there is concern that new forms will be needed to allow for the longer coding numbers to be inputted. However, the current form 1500 claims, which were updated several years ago, has already made room for the inclusion of longer diagnostic codes.

While you may have not needed to make use of the additional space with the ICD-9 forms, you most certainly will with the new ICD 10 Diagnosis Codes List. This is because many of the patient cases to be coded will require multiple codes in order to accurately show the patient's complete diagnosis.

Services Rendered:

When it comes to services rendered, however, the ICD-10 codes will not apply in these cases. A separate set of codes will be necessary. The coding for these services will remain the same. It is important to remember that you will need to update your superbills so that you can include ICD-10 Diagnostic codes along with them. The procedure for this can get quite complicated as there are probably hundreds of possible equivalents for a single ICD-9 code.

As you can see, it can be quite overwhelming so that using the new ICD 10 Diagnosis Codes List will require a bit of adjustment in order to record your data correctly. It will pay to start this process well ahead of the full implementation of the program so that if you happen to come across a few problems you will be able to get your questions answered well ahead of time. As you can see, the information collected in these new forms will be used for more than billing purposes. It will in time, help us all to develop a better understanding of what our global health condition is really like.