ICD-10 mapping portal helps mitigate coding ambiguities
A web portal to map ICD-10 codes back to ICD-9 helps ease the transition to the new coding system by simplifying searches of databases containing both types of codes, creators of the site are reporting.
In an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Arizona said that their fairly bare-bones online application produces a single diagnosis code to take some of the complexity out of retrospective searches.
The researchers noted that numerous medical specialty societies and consulting firms have advised running dual coding systems for several months during the transition, an expensive proposition.
“The comprehensive approach of our tool will allow physicians, training programs, researchers, administrators, health systems and others to compare diseases across this transition from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM,” wrote the researchers, led by translational bioinformatics specialist Yves Lussier, MD.
Opponents of switching to ICD-10 have cited the complexity of the new codeset compared to the venerable ICD-9 system. The Illinois-Arizona team acknowledged this, labeling at least 78 percent of the diagnosis codes in the 10 most complex clinical categories—of 21 total categories—for the transition as “convoluted.” They based that conclusion on an analysis of CMS General Equivalence Mappings (GEMs) files from 2014.
“Due to the way the GEMs files are designed, a researcher or evaluator will miss 30 percent of the ICD-9-CM diagnosis codes and potentially miss patients, as well, if only the ICD-10-CM GEMs files are used,” the JAMIA article stated.
“The majority of the ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM translations are complex and nonreciprocal, creating convoluted representations and meanings. Similarly, mapping back from ICD-10-CM to ICD-9-CM is equally complex, yet different from mapping forward, as relationships are likewise nonreciprocal,” the researchers wrote.
The online app, funded in part by the National Library of Medicine, helps flag potential ambiguities and redundancies when backwards-mapping ICD-10 codes to ICD-9.
Neil Versel joined TriMed in 2015 as the digital editor of Clinical Innovation + Technology, after 11 years as a freelancer specializing in health IT, healthcare quality, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.