Medical Vocabularies Report: CPT, ICD, Strengths, and Weaknesses

This report provides an overview of medical vocabularies, specifically focusing on the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). It details the purpose and use of each coding system, highlighting how CPT communicates medical procedures and services while ICD classifies diseases and health conditions. The report examines the organization and structure of CPT, including its three categories, and discusses the advancements in the latest version of ICD (ICD-11). Furthermore, it analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of both systems, pointing out CPT's cost-effectiveness and annual updates, as well as ICD's comprehensive ontological infrastructure, while also acknowledging limitations such as restricted access to CPT search results and the potential need for multiple patient visits for definitive ICD diagnoses. The report concludes with a list of relevant references.

MEDICAL VOCABULARIES
MEDICAL VOCABULARIES
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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CURRENT PROCEDURAL TERMINOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL
CLASSIFICATION OF DISEASES
PUBLISHER
The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) is a set of medical code that elaborates
surgical, diagnostic and therapeutic services and is created and maintained by the American
Medical Association. New editions of these guidelines are published in October every year
(Hirsch et al., 2015).
The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) can be defined as the diagnostic
tool for health management, clinical purposes and epidemiology. It is directed and maintained
by the World Health Organization (World Health Organization, 2020).
PURPOSE AND USE
The motive of the CPT medical code is to communicate regarding various procedures
and services among doctors, patients, coders and accreditation organizations. It also identifies
the services provided.
The primary purpose of ICD is to provide a set of diagnostic codes to classify various
diseases along with the symptoms, findings, abnormality, complaints, causes for injury and
diseases and different social circumstances. ICD maps health conditions according to general
categories with different variations and assigns a code to all these which can be of six
characters. For these reasons, there is a need for designing new major categories. The latest
category is ICD-11.
ORGANIZATION AND STRUCTURE
There are three categories of CPT (MedicalBillingandCoding.org, 2020):

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 Category 1: It comprises the processes and contemporary medical practices that are
broadly used. The codes belonging to this category can be divided into further areas
including management and evaluation, anesthesiology, surgery, radiology, pathology
and medicine.
 Category 2: It comprises of tracking codes that are used to measure performances
and help to collect more details on the quality of delivered care.
 Category 3: It comprises of codes covering services procedures and emerging
technologies. These accept all the technologies that are yet to receive accreditation
from higher organizations and others as well.
The latest version of ICD, ICD-11 will be effective from 2022 though it has been
accepted by the World Health Organization in 2019 (Evans et al., 2015). There happens to be
quite a lot of advancement in this version than the last released versions. In the new version,
anyone can submit their findings with evidence to get it recorded. The structure also boasts of
richness and flexibility.
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS
There are quite a few benefits of using CPT. It is one of the cost-effective
technologies available currently among all the medical coding systems. The coding is
updated every year which also makes it much more useful and trustworthy in terms of getting
information whereas the advantage of ICD includes its developed ontological infrastructure
that gives improved user interface. It is also significantly relevant in noting medical data. It
also provides cancer coding, mental health and dermatology coding, which makes it much
broader and informative.

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The disadvantage of using this is that the American Medical Association has limited
the access to CPT search result for only commercial purposes. It can not be used for any
personal or non-commercial uses and on the other hand disadvantage of ICD is it needs
several patient visits to come to a definitive diagnosis and can rarely be diagnosed on the very
first visit.

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REFERENCES
Evans, S. C., Roberts, M. C., Keeley, J. W., Blossom, J. B., Amaro, C. M., Garcia, A. M., &
Reed, G. M. (2015). Vignette methodologies for studying clinicians’ decision-making:
validity, utility, and application in ICD-11 field studies. International journal of clinical and
health psychology, 15(2), 160-170.
Hirsch, J. A., Leslie-Mazwi, T. M., Nicola, G. N., Barr, R. M., Bello, J. A., Donovan, W. D.,
& Manchikanti, L. (2015). Current procedural terminology; a primer. Journal of
Neurointerventional Surgery, 7(4), 309-312.
MedicalBillingandCoding.org. (2020). 2.07: Intro to CPT Coding.
MedicalBillingandCoding.org. MedicalBillingCoding.org.
https://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org/intro-to-cpt/.
World Health Organization. (2020). International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision
(ICD-11). World Health Organization. Retrieved 28 February 2020, from
https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/.