ICD-10 Codes are widely used by public health agencies, health insurance companies, and doctors, and they will have both numbers and letters. These are diagnosis codes. It means that every symptom, infection, injury, disorder, and disease has its own ICD-10 code, like the product codes used in department stores to feed the cost when billing customers quickly. Coming back to ICD-10 Codes, they are used for everything right from processing health insurance claims to accumulate global mortality stats and disease epidemics tracking.
What does ICD-10 stand for?
ICD-10 is the short form for the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related health issues. Even the term ICD is used as the abbreviation for the International Classification of Diseases. The World Health Organization publishes it and has the copyright for ICD. Also, WHO regularly updates the list of codes. In the month of June 2018, WHO released even the ICD-11, which will get to effect probably from the year 2022.
How do these codes work?
As mentioned earlier, these codes contain both numbers and letters, and they will have a minimum of three to seven characters in total. Here is a list that shows ICD-10-CM Codes for rheumatoid arthritis and its related conditions to help you get an idea:
- M05.7 – Rheumatoid Arthritis with rheumatoid factor without the involvement of any systems or organs
- M06.0 – Rheumatoid Arthritis Without Rheumatoid factor
Like the examples above, there are other codes related to this condition, like M05.73, M05.732, M06.03, M06.032, and M06.031.
Each character denotes different meaning:
- The first three characters in the code denote a specific disorder or disease, infection or symptom
- The characters 4-6 indicates the site of the body in which the problem is present
- Character 7 is an extension character used for different purposes.
Now, insurance companies and hospitals can quickly get the appropriate code based on the condition of the patient using the online lookup tool offered by us at mdcodelookup.com.