Dive Brief:
- There's no consensus among researchers as to which ICD-10 codes should be used to identify adverse drug events, according to a study appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
- Researchers found 827 ICD-10 codes being used to identify adverse drug events, including 652 codes based on disease manifestation and 175 codes used for recording external injuries.
- The study concludes that a comprehensive set of codes used to identify adverse drug events would be used in population health studies to review elements associated with such events, and find ways to prevent thehir occurrence.
Dive Insight:
We've got less than a year before the industry has to switch from ICD-9 to ICD-10 coding. If ICD-10 has limitations that need to be addressed, it's certainly good to attack them before they become embedded in daily medical practice.Now, the question becomes whether there are other critical issues with ICD-10 that we haven't found yet. It's time for researchers to go into overdrive examining patient harm issues that aren't handled well by ICD-10, before they wreak havoc.