The effectiveness of ICD-10-CM in capturing public health diseases

This research study examined the usefulness of the ICD-10-CM system in capturing public health diseases (reportable diseases or the nationally notifiable infectious diseases, leading causes of death, and morbidity/mortality related to terrorism), when compared to ICD-9-CM.1-3 It also examined agreement levels of coders when coding public health diseases in both ICD-10-CM and ICD-9-CM. Overall results demonstrate that ICD-10-CM is more specific and fully captures more of the public health diseases examined than ICD-9-CM. In the analysis of all the public health diseases, such as reportable diseases (p<0.001), top 10 causes of death (p<0.001), and those related to terrorism (p<0.001), it was found that the overall rankings for disease capture for ICD-10-CM were significantly higher than the rankings for ICD-9-CM. When examining whether diseases were captured more straightforwardly and clearly (regarding agreement levels) between coding systems, statistically significant differences were found for external causes of injury (p<0.001), diabetes (average rank only, p<0.05), lower respiratory disease (p<0.001), heart disease (p<0.001), and malignant neoplasms (p<0.05). Although this result may be due to the coder's higher level of experience with ICD-9-CM, it also points to the potential need for more specific coding education and practice with the ICD-10-CM system.