Department Blog

Posted 11/6/2019 by Deborah Stein

ICD-10 codes are more specific; how are doctors using them?

Michael Grasso, MD, PhD, FACP; Zachary Dezman, MD; and David Jerrard, MD, are among the authors of an abstract published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, “Coding disparity and specificity during emergency department visits after transitioning to the tenth version of the International Classification of Disease [ICD-10]” (full text available), from the American College of Emergency Physicians’ 2019 Research Forum. The authors sought to evaluate whether the increased granularity inherent in ICD-10 has led to greater specificity in diagnosis and coding. They found that the distribution of diagnoses remained unchanged, but there were fewer encounters with multiple codes with ICD-10, and while the post-transition encounters used more unique codes, providers did not consistently exploit these to create more specific codes.