Online tool aids the ICD-10 transition

To make the transition easier, researchers from the University of Illinois-Chicago and the University of Arizona have developed an online bidirectional map of the two code sets. The development of this tool was part of a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

By using data from 2014, the researchers identified 36 network patterns between ICD-9 and ICD-10 and grouped them into five categories. They found that although 4,127 codes translated directly from ICD-9 to ICD-10, more than 57,000 data elements did not fall neatly into ICD-10, and 669 codes that had no mapping equivalent at all.

Researchers say they hope their web-based tool will help simplify the transition through the use of code comparisons. "The comprehensive approach of our tool will allow physicians, training programs, researchers, administrators, health systems, and others to compare diseases across this transition from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM, since the tool for cohort discovery includes all but 1 percent of the ICD-9-CM codes and 1 percent of ICD-10-CM codes," they wrote.