Monday, August 4, 2008

The purpose of this blog

The sole purpose of this blog is to advocate for a better alternative to diagnosis coding than ICD-10-CM (the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification). The United States government, in particular the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is considering whether to 'switch' from coding with ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM. At present, CMS requires that all health care providers (hospitals, physicians, etc) who bill Medicare or Medicaid for services rendered, encode the diagnosis or diagnoses necessitating those services with ICD-9-CM.

The essence of our argument against the change is that ICD-10-CM, despite superficial improvements over ICD-9-CM, is not a sufficient advance to warrant the cost. The basic structure of ICD-10-CM is the same as that of ICD-9-CM, which was created in the era of punch cards and batch jobs. The science of medical terminology and ontology has advanced so far beyond the structure and content of ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM, that 'upgrading' to ICD-10-CM will preserve the Dark Ages of healthcare information.

Over the coming months, we will present our arguments against the upgrade to ICD-10-CM and in favor of a better alternative. Stay tuned.

No comments: