A Comparison Of Icd-9 Vs. ICD-10

ICD-9 vs. ICD-10
The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is a standardized diagnostic classification with a comprehensive coding system that is endorsed to analyze the mortality and morbidity trends through identifying the sources of disease, injury and death. It is published and maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO). There has always been an essential need for the periodical revision of ICD to better align the health and medical science with progress in health information technology. ICD-9 is the existing version for classification in United stated, it has been in practice for the last three decades almost. The implementation of the revised version ICD-10-CM/PCS (Clinical Modification and Procedure Classification System)
With the forthcoming shift to ICD-10, a seamless and smooth conversion is aimed to prevail. Here are some major transformations from the current form to the subsequent one.
• Specificity:
Firstly, ICD-9 had lacked to be more precise for the diseases and injuries, for example same code was allocated for the similar injuries on both arms. This deficiency of specifics led to reduced effectiveness and triggered confusions for different cases of morbidity. Whereas ICD-10 codes are executed to identify each clinical issue very specifically in the spaces of etiology, anatomic site, severity, initial and subsequent encounter and other clinical information.
• Number of Codes:
Secondly with the fact that the size of a well defined classification model really matters, an immense effort is put into ICD-10 to cater the aspect of providing more information. ICD-9 had 13000 numeric codes while ICD-10 has around 68000 alphanumeric codes with allowing a great level of
9th edition’s numeric codes were comprised of 3-5 characters while the new alphanumeric code set introduces codes with 3-7 characters and a modified pattern as well i.e. character1 is alphabetic, characters 2-3 are numeric, characters 4-6 are alpha or numeric, and character 7 is an extension also alpha or numeric and. In this revised arrangement of codes, first three characters depict the category while next four characters show the clinical detail. This example elaborates the purpose of code expansion more clearly.
S52 Fracture of forearm
S52.5 Fracture of lower end of radius
S52.52 Torus fracture of lower end of radius
S52.521 Torus fracture of lower end of right radius
S52.521A Torus fracture of lower end of right radius, initial encounter for closed fracture
• Space for New Codes:
Moreover, a very significant fact to be kept in mind is that plenty of new procedures and discoveries have been made over the last 3-4 decades. ICD-9 had a limited room to add new codes, on the contrary, ICD-10 has a great flexibility for addition of emerging procedures and illnesses.

• Combination