What are ICD codes and their Uses?

ICD is the abbreviation of the International Classification of Diseases. You will find these codes on the paperwork of the patients. They are used in hospital records, medical charts, visit records, bills and everything related to a patient. These codes were in use for many years; however, the ICD 10 Code Lookup got more popularity as it included codes for more than 70,000 diseases.

There are two basic reasons for the creation of these codes. One of them is to make sure that you get the best treatment. The second reason was to uniform the charges against medical treatments at different hospitals and clinics. The ICD codes are used widely in all medical practices including billing, treatment and data collection. Let us discuss some of them in detail:

Insurance Reimbursement

The main use of ICD codes is when the doctor submits your medical bill for insurance reimbursement. There is a CPT code for every service that well matched to the ICD code. If the code didn’t align, the insurance agency may even reject the payment and there will be no reimbursement. In other words, these codes help to monitor that the right treatment was provided against the right disease.

Disease Management

A very important use of ICD codes is disease management. There is a specific ICD code that is assigned to each disease. Your ICD code will keep a track of all your medical records. It is very important in the case a person has a chronic disease like diabetes or heart disease. It ensures that all your treatment is done keeping your chronic disease in mind. So, no medicine or treatment contradicts with your chronic disease.

You must have noted that when you visit a new doctor, they ask a lot of questions about your medical history. They are pretty related to your chronic diseases. Having an ICD code ensures that all the record is at a single place, so the doctor knows about your diseases just with the help of that code. This will help them better understand how to continue your medical treatment.

Data collection

Another important use of ICD codes is that it helps in data collection. They are used worldwide to keep track of medical data and death causes. So, if someone needs data related to any disease, they will just search for the relevant code. All the data will be available.