Diagnosing UTIs is done through a combination of clinical history, examination, and laboratory tests. Infants and the elderly may present with no symptoms at all. Other patients might complain of fever, chills, anorexia, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, pain in the abdomen or back, dysuria, hematuria, incontinence, decreased urine output or the inability to urinate, and/or altered mental status/conf...

Introduction The Department of Defense conducts syndromic surveillance of health encounter visits of Military Health System (MHS) beneficiaries. Providers within the MHS assign up to 10 diagnosis codes to each health encounter visit. The diagnosis codes are grouped into syndrome and sub-syndrome categories. On October 1, 2015, the Health and Human Services-mandated transition from ICD9-CM to IC...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to assess whether or not the change in coding classification had an impact on diagnosis and comorbidity coding in hospital discharge data across Canadian provinces. METHODS This study examined eight years (fiscal years 1998 to 2005) of hospital records from the Hospital Person-Oriented Information database (HPOI) derived from the Canadian national Disc...

BACKGROUND The new International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-11 "Allergic and hypersensitivity conditions" section has been constructed as a result of a detailed and careful action plan based on scientific evidences for the necessity of changes and collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) ICD-11 revision governance. All the efforts are being acknowledged by the Joint Allergy ...

Because ICD-10 can be a distressing topic, let’s start with some good news: Hypertension has a limited number of ICD-10 codes – only nine codes for primary hypertension and five codes for secondary hypertension. This makes the task of coding hypertension relatively simple – well, at least compared to some of the other ICD-10 complexities. Another positive change in ICD-10 is that the new code s...

Coding productivity is expected to drop significantly during the lead-up to and in the initial stages of ICD-10-CM/PCS implementation, now expected to be delayed until October 1, 2015. This study examined the differences in coding productivity between ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM/PCS for hospital inpatient cases matched for complexity and severity. Additionally, interrater reliability was calculated ...