Therasoft is excited to introduce you to the Therapist Practice Series, a blog series dedicated to helping therapists like you manage their practice successfully.

As you may know, on October 1^st, all HIPAA-covered practices must switch from ICD-9 to ICD-10 when coding diagnoses. ICD-10, released under the supervision of the World Health Organization in 1994, provided a number of changes to the previous system, perhaps most notably the increase from 14,000 to 69,000 for increased specificity. While many countries have already completed the conversion in recent years, the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) set the final compliance date to October of 2015 to ease the transition process, and the day is fast approaching!

For psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, the conversion coincides with the utilization of DSM-5 for psychiatrists and clinicians. DSM-5, published in 2013, provided comprehensive updates to many conditions outlined in the previous edition, including increased focus on cultural perspectives, developmental trajectory, and neuroscience. For example, DSM-IV included only one code for the eating disorder anorexia nervosa (ICD-9 code 307.1). With increased understanding of the symptoms of the condition, DSM-5 divided its diagnosis into two types, restricting (ICD-10 code F50.1) and binge-eating/purging (ICD-10 code F50.02).