ICD-10 transition could create patient safety data issues
The transition to ICD-10 in October 2015 could create problems with the generation of patient safety data, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
The ICD-10 transition could lead to risks for comparing safety incidents, inflating the numbers of patient safety indicators and increasing the variability of calculations attributable to the abundance of coding systems translations, according to lead author Andrew Boyd, MD, assistant professor of biomedical and health information sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and his team of researchers.
The study compared the accuracy of 23 different types of ICD-9 coded patient safety indicators against recommended ICD-10 codes using the general equivalent mappings. Of these, they found:
- Three patient safety indictors had "straightforward" ICD-10 equivalence
- 15 demonstrated "convoluted" mappings
- Five patient safety indicators had zero equivalents in ICD-10
“The burden to the healthcare system is the neglect to address transition complexity. The transition could incent unethical ‘numbers-focused’ translations to improve adverse events statistics, while observed events may be unchanged or worsened,” Boyd et al wrote. They suggested publication of new and removed patient safety indicators on public reporting sites, such as Hospital Compare.
Read the study here.