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Because these are world health organisation 'international disease classification' codes that are designed for population health study and happen to be used for
by shubb 3y ago
Because these are world health organisation 'international disease classification' codes that are designed for population health study and happen to be used for insurance billing in the US.
There are requirements for some data to be reported to federal and international organisations. For instance, these codes are also used on death certificates I think, so they can track whether a lot of people are dieing of flu (primary cause) after contact with duck (qualifier) and there is a bird flu outbreak.
There are many coding systems - semi-standard extensions of ICD used to identify very specific types of cancer or the ontology based SNOMED which is rarely used as intended but none the less is becoming the standard.
These codes are used for billing in the US to some extent but also for lots of other things, they are just a standardized set of codes that hospital IT systems use to talk about what is wrong with patients so they can somewhat interoperate - and they are forced to use them by government because the vendors prefer walled gardens over interoperability.
- gowld 3y agoBut if an app developer in a different industry doesn't know the history behind it then a must be worthless.
- shubb 3y agoThey are funny though, I just thought people might like to know the context
- ElFitz 3y agoThat’s how it usually goes. I’ve lost count of all these times a freshly onboarded dev, replacing the old one, decided the système was needlessly complex, nothing made sense, and it’d be easier to just rebuild everything from the ground up. Only to end up with a similarly complicated nonsense, because the complexity actually was in the domain, and he knew nothing of it.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago> Because these are world health organisation 'international disease classification' codes that are designed for population health study and happen to be used for insurance billing in the US. This is the root of the problem. These codes should not be used for billing. That should be much more coarse. They bill you for visiting the GP. They bill you for a surgery. Adding the codes to the records is fine and good, but really should just be an internal detail that isn't that relevant to the patient.