Quick Q&A and Resources

Q: What is ICD10?

Answer: 

The International Classification of Diseases (also known by the abbreviation ICD) is the United Nations-sponsored World Health Organization’s “standard diagnostic tool for epidemiology, health management and clinical purposes.” The ICD is designed as a health care classification system, providing a system of diagnostic codes for classifying diseases, including nuanced classifications of a wide variety of signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or disease (source: Wikipedia). 

Q: How is ICD10 different from ICD9?

Answer: 

• ICD-9 codes provide limited data about patients’ medical conditions and hospital inpatient procedures. ICD-9 is 30 years old, it has outdated and obsolete terms, and is inconsistent with current medical practices.
  

• ICD-10 codes allow for greater specificity and exactness in describing a patient’s diagnosis and in classifying inpatient procedures. ICD-10 will also accommodate newly developed diagnoses and procedures, innovations in technology and treatment, performance-based payment systems, and more accurate billing. ICD-10 coding will make the billing process more streamlined and efficient, and this will also allow for more precise methods of detecting fraud. (Source: CMS) 

Q: What do we have to do to before October 1, 2015 to prepare for the transition?

Answer:

Every provider covered by HIPAA must be ICD10 compliant by October 1, 2015. Claims for services provided on and after this date that do not use ICD-10 diagnosis and inpatient procedure codes cannot be processed.

Here are a few steps to get you and your office staff well on your way to compliance before the deadline:

1. Check out online resources (see below).
2. Become familiar with the new ICD10 codes. You can use them in charts and billing before the conversion, even though Medicare will not recognize the codes until October 1, 2015 (if your practice involves sleep medicine, we’ve prepared a handy list of the common sleep-related dx codes in ICD9 and ICD10- just click the big button below).
3. Determine howICD-10 will affect your organization. How and where do you use the codes?
   1. authorizations/pre-certifications
   2. physician orders
   3. medical records
   4. superbills/encounter forms
   5. practice management and billing systems
   6. coding manuals and training resources

Resources:

• ICD10data.com offers a great online tool for converting your favorite ICD9 codes into their ICD10 approximations: www.icd10data.com 
• The Centers for Medicare and & Medicaid Services has Official CMS Industry Resources for the ICD10 Transition: http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10 
• And we at Advanced Sleep have put together our own chart to convert some common sleep-related codes from ICD9 to ICD10! 

Click below to download our side-by-side comparison of the most common ICD9 sleep-related codes and their ICD10 approximations.

Sleep Codes Guide

Photo credit: Tom Hart http://www.flickr.com/photos/thart2009/