While hospitals and other healthcare organizations have spent millions on consultants to help them transition to ICD-10, health IT developers have spurned the opportunity to insulate clinicians from having to deal with the administrative codes, former Deputy National Coordinator for Health IT Jacob Reider, writes on his blog.
Just as a computer user can click "view source" in the browser to see the source code for a Web page--though most people don't want to--systems could be built in a similar vein that don't require clinicians to deal with ICD-10 codes, he says.
When ordering a test such as imaging or blood work, the information needed for the ICD-10 code should be in the patient's problem list, then translated in the background into the administrative code, according to Reider.
The combination of SNOMED-CT for recording of diagnosis with free ICD-10-to-SNOMED-CT mapping tools developed by the National Library of Medicine can be used to translate clinical data into ICD-10 codes for administrative transactions, he says.
"I implored folks ... to think past the veneer of the federal regulations, read the preamble of the ONC Certification criteria [where we explained much of this] and think outside of the box," Reider writes. "Innovation? Nope. Folks have read only the veneer of federal regulations from both [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] and ONC, avoided creative thinking and implemented solutions that check the regulatory box, blame the feds for it, and impose massive pain on a generation of clinicians."
The American College of Physicians, in 2012, advocated for using the ICD-10 delay to investigate whether ICD-10 codes can be automatically generated from SNOMED-CT terms.
However, in an article at the Journal of the American Health Information Management Association, Sue Bowman, senior director of coding policy and compliance at AHIMA, said that the notion that ICD-10 is complimentary to SNOMED is a myth. They serve different purposes, she argued: ICD is statistical; SNOMED is clinical.
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