The ICD is published by the World Health Organization (WHO), and provides codes to classify diseases and a wide variety of signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances and external causes of injury or disease. Every health condition can be assigned to a unique category and given a code, up to six characters long. Such categories can include a set of similar diseases. The ICD is used world-wide for morbidity and mortality statistics, reimbursement systems and automated decision support in medicine. This system is designed to promote international comparability in the collection, processing, classification, and presentation of these statistics. The ICD is the core classification of the WHO; it is revised periodically, and is currently in its tenth edition (ICD-10).
Published in Chapter:
Optimization of Medical Supervision, Management, and Reimbursement of Contemporary Home Care
B. Spyropoulos (Technological Education Institute of Athens, Greece), M. Botsivaly (Technological Education Institute of Athens, Greece), A. Tzavaras (Technological Education Institute of Athens, Greece), and K. Koutsourakis (Technological Education Institute of Athens, Greece)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-889-5.ch128
Abstract
Adapting medical and managerial decision-making (Spyropoulos, 2006a) in the modern home care environment is a cardinal prerequisite, in order to ensure, first, an economically sustainable development of the aging population healthcare (Scarcelli, 2001); second, the rehabilitation services required for impaired persons; and finally, the psychosomatic support necessary in the developed countries, during the next decades. Thus, a strategic question emerges that is how home care will be medically supervised and financially reimbursed. The present study attempts to describe the present situation and the contemporary technological trends in home care; more specific, it is focused on a system developed by our team that intends first, to enable the optimal documentation of the provided home care, and second, to facilitate the acquisition of all relevant financial data, leading to a fair remuneration of the services offered.