Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals should now be using updated ICD-10-CM codes. The codes impacting psychiatry are outlined in APA’s 2022 DSM-5-TR Update: Supplement to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and DSM-5-TR Neurocognitive Disorders Supplement.
“Every October 1, the ICD-10-CM codes for all of medicine are updated, resulting in the addition of new codes and the revision or deletion of existing codes,” wrote Michael B. First, M.D., a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in the Division of Behavioral Health and Policy Research, in a Psychiatric News article. “[C]linicians and institutions need to keep on top of these coding changes, especially since the addition of new codes usually results in some existing codes becoming obsolete.”
This year’s coding changes represent the most consequential updates for DSM-5 disorders since the October 1, 2015, changeover from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM, according to First, who is also the co-chair of the Revision Subcommittee and DSM-5-TR editor and a member of the DSM Steering Committee.
First offers several examples of the coding changes for neurocognitive disorders (NCD), including the addition of a fourth character code to indicate the severity of the major neurocognitive disorder and a combination of fifth and sixth characters to indicate the presence of an accompanying behavioral or psychological disturbance. He also describes the addition of two new mental disorder codes for mild NCD due to a medical condition with or without a behavioral disturbance.
The DSM-5-TR Update, produced by APA’s Division of Research, includes instructions on how to use the restructured NCD chapter in DSM-5-TR, information on conditions that have been added or removed from DSM-5-TR, and updated criteria for some disorders. Also, APA has updated psychiatry.org with information and documents describing the revisions in detail to make it easy to stay on top of these changes, including a list of DSM-5-TR diagnoses and prior (when applicable) and new ICD-10-CM codes.
The DSM-5-TR Neurocognitive Disorders Supplement, produced by APA Publishing, includes the DSM-5-TR classification, updated DSM-5-TR chapter on neurocognitive disorders (including revisions to the major and mild NCD coding table, coding notes for each NCD, and a newly added NCD disorder to enhance characterization of NCD symptom pattern and severity in cases where the precise etiology is unknown), and alphabetical and numerical listings in the Appendix that contain each of the more than 400 new NCD code listings.
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