ICD-11 is scheduled for release in 2017, making the delay in the release of ICD-10-CM in 2014 until 2015 potentially problematic. Further delays in ICD-10-CM, which at this point seem possible, will lead to additional voices recommending that ICD-10-CM be skipped entirely. This makes some sense from an informatics standpoint as ICD-11 is being modified to make it more applicable to clinically oriented information systems and compatible with SNOMED CT.
If the U.S. goes forward with ICD-10-CM in October of 2015 this may not result a delay in ICD-11 until an ICD-11-CM version is completed. ICD-11 could be adopted as the terminology for HIT systems in the near future, well ahead of a release of an ICD-10-CM version. This advantage of this approach would be the following:
- It would allow for compatibility for disease reporting with the majority of other nations, as ICD-11 will be adopted by the majority of industrialized nations outside of the U.S. within the next 3-4 years.
- It may allow for improved mapping from a core clinical terminology system (e.g., if SNOMED CT is “updated” to ICD-11) to ICD-10-CM for claims reporting.
- It will allow advances in the use of terminology to be shared internationally, leading to improvements in data integrity, analytics, predictive modeling, point of care clinical operations, clinical decision making, clinical research, genomic information at the point of care, and other emerging trends.
- It will allow for improvements in the semantic interoperability between data captured by systems using different languages (e.g., Spanish, English, Mandarin, etc.)
If this approach were to be taken, one might expect to see the rapid development of an ICD-11-CM version in the U.S., unless ICD-11/SNOMED CT can be configured to meet billing and other reporting requirements that are intended features in ICD-10-CM.
The information shared in this article represent the opinions of its author, Michael Stearns, MD, CPC