Looking to learn ICD-10 without breaking the bank? One coder shares her strategy

Are you an educator who needs to learn ICD-10 as soon as possible so that you can be prepared to teach your students, coding staff members, or other clients and entities that you serve?

Are you working for a vendor or a third-party payer and need to know the underlying fundamentals of ICD-10 so that you can start upgrading coding software and payment systems as soon as possible?

Are you concerned that your employer may not be willing to expense the few available training programs that are currently being offered, some costing as much as $1500-$1,900?

Guess what – there is a low cost (practically free) option for comprehensive training. I am an educator and have students and clients who will be looking to me for ICD-10 education. In addition, I have set my own professional goal of being a leader on the cutting edge.

I knew that I could not waste time trying to determine whether any of my employers or clients would reimburse the costs, and being an independent consultant I certainly did not have the funds to expend $1,000 or more on training. So I decided that the best option was to educate myself.

I had already been reading and had even contributed to the American Health Information Management Association’s ICD-10 CheckPoint section in their monthly CodeWrite publication, which outlined a table comparing and contrasting ICD-9 and ICD-10 for common conditions. I had also written a paper on the structure of ICD-10-PCS for a school project. So with that background, I was determined to educate myself on both ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS.

Back in July/August of 2008 when I first constructed my self-directed education plan, there weren’t nearly as many resources as there are now. I put together a list of Internet links that contained ICD-10 information.

Then I came up with a mnemonic (i.e., memory aid) to memorize all the letters that precede each section of ICD-10-CM so that I could better recognize the codes by their first letter. For example, all codes beginning with O are obstetric codes, and all codes beginning with P are perinatal codes.

As a refresher for the basic structural differences between ICD-9 and ICD-10, I prepared a quiz for myself with questions and answers pertaining to this facet. Then I started reading through the official guidelines for ICD-10, which at the time were from 2003.

I was so happy to see easier guidelines for sepsis, rheumatic heart disease, angina, myocardial infarction, and ulcers (just to name a few), and I marked up my copy of the guidelines to highlight all guidance that was different from that in the ICD-9 .

I downloaded the 2007 version of ICD-10-CM (both the index and the tabular) to my desktop so that I could readily open and reference the files at any time. I did not purchase books because I felt that it was a little too soon to do that because CMS was still updating the codes. However, I did see the need for detailed anatomy references (for bones, vessels, nerves, etc.), and I considered that I would probably invest in a detailed anatomy reference for these if I did not have access to Elsevier’s Anatomy Plates by 3M. I also considered using Gray’s Anatomy.

This is where I start to really get my hands dirty. Tune in for my next blog post, when I  describe how I dove headfirst into refining my own homegrown coding reference Excel spreadsheet — a valuable tool that had become part of my daily routine.

Have you created your own action plan for learning ICD-10? What resources did you turn to?