Having at least a basic understanding of coding is important, he adds, especially for those living with chronic disease.

While coding may seem like backend gibberish, it has a critical impact on your everyday health care and the overall study of your medical conditions.Įither patients don’t know much about ICD codes at all, or “patients tend to throw up their hands at codes because codes are confusing or they don’t know how codes are used,” says Rick Gundling, Senior Vice President of Healthcare Financial Practices for the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA). Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) are in charge of overseeing ICD codes. But to a global network of health care professionals, insurance companies, researchers, and electronic medical record systems, your condition also goes by a certain code - in this case, K50.90.Ĭalled International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes, these sets of letters and numbers are maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), which most recently released its 10th version, called ICD-10, back in 2015. You may think of yourself as living with a chronic condition such as Crohn’s disease.

Icd 10 code for rheumatoid arthritis