Utility of ICD-9-CM Diagnosis Codes for Public Health Surveillance

ICD-9-CM codes have been proposed to be used as adjuncts to existing public health reporting systems and are commonly used for public health surveillance and research purposes. However these codes have been found to have variable accuracy for both healthcare billing as well as for disease classification due to both coding and physician errors, and these codes have never been comprehensively validated for their use for surveillance. Quantification of the positive predictive value for ICD-9 CM diagnosis codes is crucial for assessing their utility for public health disease surveillance and research.

Objective

To quantify the positive predictive values of ICD-9 CM diagnosis codes for public health surveillance of communicable diseases.