I bid you all Friday greetings from suburban Atlanta.

I’ll share the reasons for this week’s appearance being from Georgia momentarily, but being on the literal road during what will be my last vacation stop of the year reminds me of another figurative road I currently find myself upon as a coder; the road to the implementation of ICD-10 as the reporting standard for diagnosis and symptomology reporting.

In a little under four years, ICD-9 will be a thing of the past. Replacing it will be a code set containing over 100,000 codes. While at first this seems daunting and deflating, I console myself with the knowledge that ICD-10 will lead to an advanced degree of specificity in diagnosis and treatment of patient conditions. It is hoped that one outcropping of this will be a general increase in favorable patient outcomes.

It is important for me to point out that I was one of the coders in the minority who felt that it would have made more sense to wait for ICD-11, which is set to be released by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2014, roughly three months after American adoption of ICD-10. Unfortunately, The American Hospital Association (AHA) and the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) felt that it was more important to ram ICD-10 forward quickly and at all costs rather than be on the same page diagnostically with the rest of the medicinally civilized world. The official reason given in the Final Rule was that it would take 5 years to come up with a clinical modification to ICD-11. This is belied by the fact that WHO is building a clinical modification to ICD-11 as part of the initial release. In ten years time, the American health care reporting infrastructure will find itself exactly where it finds itself now; utilizing an outdated coding system that is out of step with the rest of the world. Given the lengthy debate that just recently ended with ICD-10, it is extremely possible that I shall be dead before ICD-11 become a reality in the United States. With an outdated reporting and diagnostic structure, I may not be alone.

Let me try to end this on a high note. So you may be asking what brought me to Georgia. I have an old friend who lives just north of Atlanta who is recording his second album, and I have been recruited to supply lead vocals on four tracks. I’m about to do the last track once this entry is finished. It may come as a surprise to many of you that my incessant bellowing takes on many forms. I now transition from the semi-professional scribblings you are used to here to the musical warblings of my hobby life. Enjoy your weekend, wherever you are.

9:45 am, October 23rd, 2009 |