Cardiac impairment or heart failure?: Changing the name has knock-on effects

doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7516.577-b

BMJ 2005;331:577 (10 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7516.577-b

Letter

Cardiac impairment or heart failure?

Changing the name has knock-on effects

The first 100% of the full text of this article appears below.

EDITOR—Lehman et al suggest calling "heart failure" "cardiacimpairment."¹ As a clinical coder, I bring to your attentionthat "heart failure" is coded to the ICD-10 (international classificationof diseases, 10th revision) code I50.9; the description of thiscode includes "heart failure, biventricular failure, and cardiac,heart or myocardial failure, not otherwise stated." However,a diagnosis of "heart impairment" with no further qualifyingdescription sends coders to the code I51.9; the descriptionof this code is "heart disease, unspecified."

If a change of description of the condition is decided on byclinicians, please would they consider informing their clinicalcoding departments of the change? If coding departments werenot informed, the codes applied to the condition might wellalter with the change of name, even though the condition itselfstayed the same.

Catie Gilbert, clinical coder

Clinical Coding Department, West Suffolk Hospitals NHS Trust, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk IP33 2QZ catie.gilbert@wsh.nhs.uk

Competing interests: None declared.