An Updated International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) Surveillance Case Definition for Injury Hospitalizations

Abstract

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) have routinely collaborated with injury epidemiology partners to develop standard injury surveillance case definitions based on the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). With the transition in October 2015 to the use of the ICD, 10th Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) for reporting medical information in administrative claims data, NCHS and NCIPC proposed an ICD-10-CM surveillance case definition for injury hospitalizations. At the time, ICD-10-CM coded data were not readily available, and the proposed surveillance definition could not be tested using real data. As ICD-10-CM coded data became available, NCHS and NCIPC collaborated with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, injury epidemiologists from state and local health departments, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to test the proposed definition. This report summarizes the findings from the testing process and describes how the findings were used to update the proposed case definition. In the updated ICD-10-CM surveillance case definition, injury hospitalizations are identified as hospitalization records with a principal diagnosis of select ICD-10-CM S, T, O, and M codes. The codes must indicate an initial encounter for active treatment of an injury or be missing encounter type information. The selection criteria exclude hospitalization records with an injury as a secondary or subsequent diagnosis (not the principal diagnosis) or that have an external cause-of-injury code but do not have an injury code as the principal diagnosis. The updated ICD-10-CM surveillance case definition for injury hospitalizations provides standardized selection criteria for monitoring differences in hospitalization rates among populations and over time.