Below is a summary of “Infrequently Used ICD-10-CM Codes to Document Human Trafficking in the 2019 National Emergency Department Sample,” published in the February 2023 issue. emergency medicine Dell and others
The Emergency Department (ED) sees human trafficking (HT) victims. In June 2018, codes describing HT were added to the updated disease classification, ICD-10-CM. For the study, the researchers sought to identify the characteristics of her ED patients who had endured forced labor or sexual exploitation as perceived external factors when visiting the United States.
In 2021, nationally representative monitoring will be available based on patient visits to 989 hospital-owned EDs in the 2019 National Emergency Department sample. The code has been aggregated into one her HT variable.
External factors of HT prevalence were identified by a weighted count of 517 out of 33.1 million ED visits (0.0016%). Sexual exploitation (71.6%) was reported more frequently compared to labor exploitation (28.4%). The majority of HT-related codes were created by metropolitan white women (87.3%). Nearly 40% of her visitors were from her ZIP area, where her median annual household income is less than $48,000. Patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) with HT as an external cause of morbidity were female (OR = 6.54, 95% CI: 3.59, 11.92) and minors (OR = 1.76, 95% CI: 1.02, 3.04) and others. compared with all ED visits in .
In 989 hospital emergency department visits from a nationally representative sample in 2019, HT was rarely recorded as an external cause of morbidity. The recent new HT ICD-10-CM code does not appear to have been deployed sufficiently to create an accurate depiction of people who have experienced HT and sought treatment for ED. Training of ED staff in HT detection and response should be addressed before efforts to increase the value of the ICD-10-CM HT Code for monitoring and documentation. In doing so, ED staff also address ethical issues (stigma, confidentiality, potential harm to patients, etc.) and ethically expand their practice by educating patients who are trafficking victims. You must allow informed authorization for
reference: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735675722007148
