Sure, there are other uses for the data. But the fact remains that generating it isn't free. And changing the coding in and of itself incurs significant administrative cost, so "we've come this far; we might a well just keep going" isn't really a compelling reason to expand ICD.
> Sure, there are other uses for the data. But the fact remains that generating it isn't free. And changing the coding in and of itself incurs significant administrative cost, so "we've come this far; we might a well just keep going" isn't really a compelling reason to expand ICD.
The WHO expands and revises ICD all the time - and how it gets used by US health insurance isn’t really a concern of theirs. The WHO has 194 member states and the US is only one of them. WHO intends the ICD to be used for collecting public heath and cause of death statistics, and if some countries want to use it for insurance/billing - that’s their problem, not the WHO’s
The US uses its own modified version of ICD-10, ICD-10-CM, which adds even more codes. A lot of those added US-specific codes exist simply because some hospital - or bureau of vital statistics - somewhere in the US, was tracking that. Other countries have done the same thing - Australia has the ICD-10-AM, Canada the ICD-10-CA, Germany the ICD-10-GM, etc
Just because a code exists doesn’t mean you have to use it for any particular purpose. Indeed, most medical software packages permit disabling codes you don’t want clinicians to be able to use. In an insurance system, a code like Y35.5 is likely marked as non-billable.
Yes, but the ICD isn’t for health insurance, it is for international standardisation of mortality and morbidity statistics, so they can be compared between countries. That’s its purpose and the reason for its existence
The fact that the US chooses to use it for something which was not its originally intended purpose is the fault of the US, not the fault of the ICD. The WHO doesn’t force the US health insurance system to use it, the US could invent its own totally unrelated coding system for that purpose and the WHO wouldn’t care (so long as those codes can be converted to ICD codes for statistical analysis)
Most of the complaints in these comments have been about diagnosis codes (ICD-10-CM) not procedure codes (ICD-10-PCS).
Both ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS are produced by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). But ICD-10-CM is just a national version of WHO ICD-10, and as such entirely comparable to other national versions such as Australia's ICD-10-AM or Germany's ICD-10-GM. Whereas, ICD-10-PCS, despite its name, doesn't really have anything to do with WHO ICD at all, it is a purely American invention. Other countries have their own equivalents to ICD-10-PCS–for example, the Australian equivalent is ACHI (Australian Classification of Health Interventions), but unlike the US, Australia doesn't mislead people into thinking that our national procedure coding system is part of WHO ICD
