Transitioning to ICD-10-CM: Resources and tools to facilitate injury morbidity research

Researchers who study injury morbidity frequently use hospital discharge, emergency department, trauma registry or other data coded using the clinical modification of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).  Beginning in October 2015, all hospitals and health care providers covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) will be required to use ICD-10-CM rather than ICD-9-CM when reporting medical information. With the transition to ICD-10-CM, injury researchers who use administrative data will face new opportunities as well as challenges in the analysis of morbidity data as a result of the increased number and complexity of the ICD-10-CM codes.

This presentation will provide the latest information on the transition to ICD-10-CM, including an overview of the injury codes and tools that have been developed for standardized categorization of injuries by mechanism and intent of injury and by nature of injury and body region (the proposed ICD-10-CM External Cause and Injury Diagnosis matrices). Proposed ICD-10-CM surveillance case definitions, in particular the surveillance case definition for traumatic brain injury will also be presented. Other topics include future efforts to assess the specificity and sensitivity of code groups, the development of comparability ratios between ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM, and projects to explore the use of ICD-10-CM to measure injury severity, including mapping to the Abbreviated Injury Score (AIS) and generating empirically derived severity measures, such as survival risk ratios. Limitations in the use of ICD-10-CM for injury morbidity research and possible solutions to address these limitations will also be presented.