5 Reasons Not to Leap to ICD-11

In our previous post, we discussed reasons why moving directly to ICD-11 would be beneficial for the healthcare industry. However, there are organizations such as the Coalition for ICD-10 who think otherwise. The Coalition for ICD-10, which is composed of 22 coding societies, hospitals, health plans, and health IT vendors, is on the defense as people say that ICD-10 might be further delayed again.

This coalition, including Health IT Now Coalition, BlueCross BlueShield Association, and Roche Diagnostics Corporation, supports the upcoming ICD-10 implementation. It claims that the coding system would not be ready for this drastic leap to skip ICD-10 and move straight to ICD-11. The US version of ICD-10 was created after years of research, input, and modifications. With so much time spent in creating ICD-10, the coalition states that it could take up to 30 years for ICD-11 to come out.

According to ICD-10 supporters, some of the top reasons to stick with ICD-10 are:

  1. It has taken 16 years to create ICD-10 and would realistically take more than two years to implement ICD-11 also (contrasting the WHO that claims it would be implemented in 2017).
  2. ICD-11 is built on ICD-10 and benefits from the clinical knowledge and additional detail that have been incorporated into the ICD-10 version.
  3. Training and overall implementation would be more difficult and time-consuming for physicians if they didn’t already know ICD-10.
  4. The US needs immediate revisions and cannot wait for ICD-11 for any more of its health data to deteriorate.
  5. ICD-10 would not be too difficult to implement because every other major advanced country is already using it and it is now available in 42 languages.