Bonus: This map makes ICD-10 prep a piece of cake. (Editor's note: Pain Management Corner is a new monthly feature full of great tips and advice for neurology coders encountering pain management situations in their practices. Drop us an e-mail at
toml@eliresearch.com and let us know what services your office is doing, or suggest future topics.) Now that headache classifications, ICD-9, and ICD-10 are aligned, updating your diagnoses shouldn't be as much of a pain provided you have the lowdown on what separates the 339 codes. You can say goodbye to outmoded terminology, no epidemiology, and misclassification. The International Headache Society (IHS) published its revised International Headache Classification system (ICHD-2) in 2004, but prior ICD-9 codes didn't align with the new structure. Now, ICD-9 and the ICHD-2 are on the same page, which is good news for your practice, now and in the future, since ICD-10 descriptors closely map to [...]