What UK ICD-10 Use Can Teach the US ICD-10 Implementations

I guess kind of like they just had Shark Week on TV, this week on EMR and HIPAA has been ICD-10 week. So far I’ve covered EMR vendors ICD-10 planning, moving to ICD-10 and bridging from ICD-9 to ICD-10.

In response to my previous ICD-10 posts, Gordon Fenton provided this interesting insight about the UK’s experience with ICD-10.

Over in the UK we already use the ICD10 along side the OPCS code to generate our HRG’s which is the currenvy that commissioners and providers use in the billing process.

While I am based on the commissioner side I know that our providers employ coders whose specific job is to translate Doctors notes into ICD and OPCS codes.

The main challenge will be in varifying and validating the codes being applied by providers, the IT is just a small issue. It will be very easy for providers to inadvertantly apply the wrong code simply by the fact that there are so many.

You could do a lot worse than look at the UK model for guidance on how we deal with it

I’m always interested to learn from what other countries are doing with technology and EMR. I’d love to learn more about UK provider’s experience with ICD-10 and how we can improve the eventual ICD-10 implementations in the US.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • Sitting as QA on an ICD-10 Project in the UK in the ’90s I am amazed at the attitude in the US that this is “impossible” “an infringement of rights” and many other criticisms. Just like they complain about the costs of healthcare and how giving to everyone will make it unaffordable, when the US already spends more than twice what the top 10 healthcare systems do per person to languish at #37 in the WHO/OECD table.

  • Patrick,
    Did you see the recent report that showed that the US offers the same amount of healthcare to patients as in other nations, but the costs of the same healthcare is just a lot higher? Makes for an interesting argument that the US healthcare costs aren’t necessarily because we don’t treat patients.

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