202 – SPEED: Statistics in Government and Engineering, Part 2A
Implementation of the ICD-10 CM/PCS Coding System and Implications for the National Health Care Surveys
Margaret J. Hall
National Center for Health Statistics
Kellina Phan
National Center for Health Statistics
Denys T. Lau
National Center for Health Statistics
In October 2015, the U.S. healthcare industry adopted the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) for diagnoses, and the Procedure Coding System (ICD-10-PCS) for procedures. This change significantly affects how the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) collects, processes and reports data on the National Health Care Surveys, a family of nationally representative surveys of health care providers. This paper discusses major initiatives that the NCHS' Division of Health Care Statistics (DHCS) is taking in response to the implementation of this change. The DHCS ICD-10 Transitional Committee was convened to establish new coding and operational procedures to facilitate swift, efficient adaptation to ICD-10. Extensive training was conducted with field representatives on how to abstract detailed information from medical records, and with coding staff to understand new coding logic to assign correct codes. Studies are underway to determine how to group ICD-10 codes into meaningful categories and ensure comparability with ICD-9 codes for national benchmarking and trend analyses. These efforts are important for producing valid and reliable statistics.