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ADA Standards Committee on Dental Informatics Meeting

AMERICAN DENTAL ASSOCIATION

STANDARDS COMMITTEE ON DENTAL INFORMATICS

NOVEMBER 2-4 2015

WASHINGTON, DC

The Standards Committee meeting commenced on November 2 with 12 Working Groups over 2 days with a Plenary Session on November 4 with summary reports. Attendance at this meeting included Orthodontics, Private Practice, Air Force, Dental Research, Dental Medicine, General Dentistry, Maxillofacial Surgeons, Pediatric Dentistry, Endodontics, Prosthodontics, Delta Dental (as well as other insurance companies), and various software companies, such as Carestream Dental, Document Storage, etc. 

At the Plenary session on Wednesday, the Working Groups gave summaries of all their activities. Subjects covered included forensics, Dental Claims, Electronic Pharmaceutical Standards, and Dental Laboratory Standards. The integrated health record, teledentistry, digital imaging, systems security, DICOM standards, consumer guide to electronic dental records, orthodontic standards, tracking of implantable items of human origin, Educational Software, research opportunities in dental informatics, Periodontal standards, SNODENT (Systematized Nomenclature of Dentistry), ICD-10, Electronic Order entries, and Infection Control related to digital equipment.

The afternoon program discussed the history of ICD (International Classification of Diseases) codes.  ICD-9 was adopted in 1979 but they’ve ran out of numbers. Therefore ICD-10-CM (CM is the clinical uses in the United States and stands for Clinical Modification) came about with some 69,000 code possibilities rather than the 14,000 limit on ICD-9. There was a presentation on its use and history and is available at www.ADA.org/icd10. A complete list of ICD10 codes are found on www.ICD10Data.com

Medicare started using diagnostic codes in 1989. ICD-9 was mandated in 2000 to link to CPT codes for submission. SNOMED is 10 years old, but also not in wide use. The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) is a systematic, computer-processable collection of medical terms, in human and veterinary medicine, to provide codes, terms, synonyms and definitions which cover anatomy, diseases, findings, procedures, microorganisms, substances, etc. If you want more information on SNOMED go to www.IHTSDO.org. SNODENT is a subset of SNOMED, not as complex as SNOMED but is much more complicated and more complex than ICD-10. In addition, it must be used electronically like SNOMED. We would use only a small subset of SNOMED (300,000 concepts) vs. SNODENT (7500 Concepts) and maybe even less. It hasn’t been adopted but that may come in the future. For more information on SNODENT go to www.ADA.org/SNODENT. A presentation was given on how to modify and maintain CDT codes. For the CDT 2017 the deadline was November 1, 2015. The next deadline is November 1, 2016 for the CDT 2018 codes. www.ada.org/en/publications/cdtgives information on how to request a code change. This is where the actual form that can be downloaded and submitted. http://www.ada.org/en/publications/cdt/request-to-change-to-the-code. Look for PROCEDURE CODE - Addition / Revision / Deletion (DOC) on that page.

One additional ADA benefit was announced that all the Technical Reports developed by this Committee are now free and downloadable from the ADA website. These should be available shortly.  If you want more information about any of the committee’s activities, these Technical Reports are a valuable place to start. The full report of this meeting is available at the ACP office.

Respectfully submitted,
Stephen F. Bergen, DDS
ACP Liaison to the ADA Standards Committee on Dental Informatics

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