Question

You are the director of HIM. The administrator, Stan, comes to you to discuss a change that he wants to make. Stan wants you either to stop using ICD-10 CM, ICD-10-PCS, and HCPCS codes and start coding all of your records in Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine ( SNOMED) or to add SNOMED to your coding responsibilities without additional staff of course. He has heard that SNOMED is much more detailed. He wants to use it so that he can have as much information as possible to make decisions affecting the hospital.

Formulate your response to Stan. Include the role of SNOMED, the role of HCPCS, how HCPCS and SNOMED are assigned, and more.

Answer 1

Role of HCPCS

It is a comprehensive and standardized systen that classifies similar products that are medical in nature into categories for the purpose of efficient claims processing

HCPCSlevel II are divided into 17 sections

For example HCPCS A - Transportation services such as Ambulance, medical and surgical supplies

HCPCS B- Enternal and parental therapy

etc

The main purposes of ICD and HCPCS codes is for BILLING and Epidemiology

It is not designed for clinicsl decision support, population management, Data aggregation and research.

Role of SNOMED

It is a common language that enables a consistent way of indexing, storing, retrieving, and aggregating clinical data across specialities and sites of care.

It is not in wide use at this time

Would potentially allow for more accurate and reliable information sharing

As a HIM, i will discuss to stan to go through lot of research findings about the impact of SNOMED because it is a new arrival. If the benefits of SNOMED overcome the HCPCS i will speak to the higher level managements to implement SNOMED codes for future use.