There are many (too many if you ask me) sets of medical codes, ICD being one of them. ICD-9 is widely used in US because Medicare uses it for billing purposes, but it is not considered very good for medical practice and ICD-10 isn't much better really. There are better ones like ULMS [1]. And many code sets have some sort of conversion to ICD-9 for billing.
The problem though is not really the particular medical code set a hospital uses, but rather medical professionals have to know the codes. Codes are for machines not humans. The doctor should just have to put into the medical record the diagnosis, location in or on the body, etc. The software then figures out the right code and sends the code to another system. Some medical software is built that way, but many medical systems require the input of the code itself. It is analogous to making users remember and enter their UUID rather than their username when they login or making users enter the IP address rather than a domain name. It is silly.
The problem though is not really the particular medical code set a hospital uses, but rather medical professionals have to know the codes. Codes are for machines not humans. The doctor should just have to put into the medical record the diagnosis, location in or on the body, etc. The software then figures out the right code and sends the code to another system. Some medical software is built that way, but many medical systems require the input of the code itself. It is analogous to making users remember and enter their UUID rather than their username when they login or making users enter the IP address rather than a domain name. It is silly.
1. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/