How many disease and procedure codes are coded in the Medical SAS® Datasets? Are all the procedures provided to a patient captured by the ICD-9-CM codes?
The main datasets contain up to to 13 diagnostic code variables (DXPRIME, DXF2-DXF13) per admission. But the complete list of diagnostic codes that have been assigned to a patient for a particular admission can be retrieved from the bedsection dataset. Procedure codes are kept in the Procedure or the Surgery datasets and all the procedures done on an inpatient basis are captured. There are only five procedure code fields in these datasets, but since a second or more records can be created as needed, there is no upper limit in the number of procedures that can be coded. Both the diagnostic and procedure codes are in ICD-9-CM for inpatient services. For outpatient services, up to 10 diagnostic code variables (DXLSF, DXF2-DXF10) are recorded for an event in ICD-9-CM format. An event is equivalent to one clinic stop encounter. Until FY2004, up to 15 procedures (CPT1-CPT15) were recoded in CPT-4 format for each outpatient event. If the limits of these two categories are reached, the values
