Handling age specification in the SNOMED CT to ICD-10-CM cross-map

A SNOMED CT-encoded problem list will be required to satisfy the Certification Criteria for Stage 2 "Meaningful Use" of the EHR incentive program. ICD-10-CM will be replacing ICD-9-CM as the reimbursement code set in the near future. Having a cross-map from SNOMED CT to ICD-10-CM will promote the use of SNOMED CT as the primary problem list terminology, while easing the transition to ICD-10-CM. This rule-based map will support semi-automatic generation of ICD-10-CM codes from SNOMED CT-encoded data. Among the different types of rules, the age rule is used to handle age-specific code assignment in ICD-10-CM. To supplement the manual process of creation of age rules, a special QA process was implemented to flag maps that were potentially missing age rules. The QA flagged 342 concepts for review (out of 7,277), of which 172 concepts (50.3%) were true positives. Without the special QA, many of the age rules would have been missed.