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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Diagnostic codes are used widely within health care for billing, quality assessment, and to measure clinical outcomes. The US health care system will transition to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM), in October 2015. Little is known about how this transition will affect pediatric practices. The objective of this study was to examine how the transition to ICD-10-CM may result in ambiguity of clinical information and financial disruption for pediatricians. METHODS: Using a statewide data set from Illinois Medicaid specified for pediatricians, 2708 International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification, diagnosis codes were identified. Diagnosis codes were categorized into 1 of 5 categories: identity, class-to-subclass, subclass-to-class, convoluted, and no translation. The convoluted and high-cost diagnostic codes (n = 636) were analyzed for accuracy and categorized into “information loss,” “overlapping categories,” “inconsistent,” and “consistent.” Finally, reimbursement by Medicaid was calculated for each category. RESULTS: Twenty-six percent of pediatric diagnosis codes are convoluted, which represents 21% of Illinois Medicaid pediatric patient encounters and 16% of reimbursement. The diagnosis codes represented by information loss (3.6%), overlapping categories (3.2%), and inconsistent (1.2%) represent 8% of Medicaid pediatric reimbursement. CONCLUSIONS: The potential for financial disruption and administrative errors from 8% of reimbursement diagnosis codes necessitates special attention to these codes in preparing for the transition to ICD-10-CM for pediatric practices.

CONTEXT:Successful care transitions between emergency departments (EDs) and outpatient settings have implications for quality, safety, and cost of care.OBJECTIVE:To investigate the effectiveness of ED-based care transition interventions in achieving outpatient follow-up among pediatric patients.DATA SOURCES:Medline, Embase, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, trial registers, and reference lists of relevant articles.STUDY SELECTION AND DATA EXTRACTION:Eligible studies included randomized controlled trials of ED-based care transition interventions involving pediatric patients (aged ≤18 years). Study selection, data extraction, and risk of bias assessment were performed in duplicate and independent manner. Study results were pooled for meta-analysis by using a random effects model.RESULTS:Sixteen randomized controlled trials, comprising 3760 patients, were included in the study. Most interventions were single-site (n = 14), multicomponent (n = 12), and focused on patients with asthma (n = 8). Pooling data from 10 studies (n = 1965 patients) found moderate-quality evidence for a relative increase of 29% in outpatient follow-up with interventions compared with routine care (odds ratio, 1.58 [95% confidence interval, 1.08–2.31]). Successful interventions included structured telephone reminders, educational counseling on follow-up, and appointment scheduling assistance. There was low-quality evidence when pooling data from 5 studies (n = 1609 participants) that exhibited little or no beneficial effect of interventions on ED readmissions (risk ratio, 1.02 [95% confidence interval, 0.91–1.15]).LIMITATIONS:All studies were conducted in urban US hospitals which makes generalization of the results to rural settings and other countries difficult.CONCLUSIONS:ED-based care transition interventions are effective in increasing follow-up but do not seem to reduce ED readmissions. Further research is required to investigate the mechanisms that affect the success of these interventions.