Soon, the USA will be only 30 years behind in healthcare

Unless one travels in medical or healthcare circles, it’s highly doubtful that ICD-9 codes mean anything.

Why?

ICD stands for International Classification of Diseases, or more accurately, International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems. But it’s known as ICD.

So what’s the “9” for?

It means it’s the 9th revision.

And what good is ICD-9?

It’s a means of tracking disease.

And, to put things in perspective, while the article below would tend to infer that a one year delay might be a bad thing, consider that the work upon ICD-10 has been ongoing since 1983, and was adopted by the World Health Organization in 1990.

That means that the United States has not been using the most up-to-date resource.

Does that really come as a surprise?

Our computers & smartphones bug us for updates regularly, but the biggest healthcare consuming nation in the world is using outdated medical codes. Is that not weird, or even worse… tragic?

Soon, ICD-11 will be presented for approval and official endorsement by member nations of the World Health Assembly with rapid implemented expected by other nations. And, it will be electronic healthcare record ready!

How soon?

How’s 2015 strike you?

How far behind will the United States be then?

At that rate, North Korea will have put their man on the moon… and probably claim it as their own.

And the good ol’ USA?

And people say the United States is not progressive enough!

Anybody wanna’ buy buggy whips?

—

ICD-10 Likely to Be Pushed Back a Year

By Anna Wilde Mathews, April 9, 2012, 5:20 PM ET

It’s official – the Obama administration is proposing to push back by a year the deadline for a new medical-coding standard that was originally set to go into effect on October 1, 2013.

Federal regulators had previously signaled that they would postpone implementation of the coding set known as ICD-10. Now the Department of Health and Human Services has come out with the actual date, as part of a broader proposed rule that includes assigning a new identifier to health plans that could be used in billing. The department says the entire proposal could save as much as $4.6 billion over ten years.

But the main headline for most hospitals, doctors and health insurers is the ICD-10 delay. In a press release, the department said the breather will give them “more time to prepare and fully test their systems to ensure a smooth and coordinated transition to these new code sets.”

The move is “an attempt to give people some ability to reprioritize,” as health-care companies face deadlines tied to the federal health-care overhaul, implementation of electronic medical records, and other shifts, Kaveh Safavi, an Accenture managing director, told the Health Blog.

ICD-10 is an update and expansion of diagnosis and procedure codes that are widely used in medical billing, as well as for research and other purposes. Some groups had said the health-care system wasn’t going to be ready for the 2013 date, and American Medical Association has actually urged that the entire thing be scrapped, saying the new set of billing codes will burden the practice of medicine without improving care. The 10th iteration of the disease-classification system will expand the number of codes in use from around 18,000 in the current ICD-9 code set to about 140,000.

Image: iStockphoto

—

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2012/04/09/icd-10-likely-to-be-pushed-back-a-year/tab/print/