Describe The Difference Between Icd-9 And ICD-10 In Healthcare

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International Classification of Diseases 10 (ICD-10) is a code set implemented by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1993 to replace ICD-9, however, it was not implemented in the United States until October of 2015. This code set is used by healthcare providers, medical coders and billers to classify and code the symptoms, diagnoses and in-patient procedures in a healthcare setting. In this paper, I will be talking about the differences between ICD-9 and ICD-10, what kind of training the healthcare workers had to take to correctly use ICD-10 and how it affected the healthcare setting.
To begin, these code sets have a highly difference in the amount of codes. For example, by October, 2015 there were approximately 56,000 more codes in ICD-10 than in ICD 9. Another difference between these two is the structure of the codes. ICD-9 codes are three to five characters long, while the ICD-10 codes have three to seven characters, both code sets alphanumeric. In addition, ICD-10 codes are more specific than …show more content…

First, the increased specificity of the ICD-10 code set forced them (the healthcare providers and medical coders) to refresh their knowledge in anatomy and physiology of the human body. To explain this, with ICD-10 they must codify not only the vein, but which vein is affected. For this reason, these people had to be well prepared to know specifically which vein they were going to code. Medicine practice is advancing every day, and with it new terminology that enhances the communication between the healthcare workers and helps them to speak the same language. This made these workers to study and learn much more this language that, without the proper training, seems to be complex. It should be noted that by 2015 many agencies were offering free training for employees on how to correctly code with ICD-10, given that this code set had new guidelines that ICD-9 did not

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