The Department of Defense conducts syndromic surveillance of health encounter visits of Military Health System (MHS) beneficiaries. Providers within the MHS assign up to 10 diagnosis codes to each health encounter visit. The diagnosis codes are grouped into syndrome and sub-syndrome categories. On October 1, 2015, the Health and Human Services-mandated transition from ICD- 9-CM to ICD-10-CM required evaluation of the syndrome mappings to establish a baseline of syndrome rates within the DoD. The DoD data within the BioSense system currently utilizes DoD ESSENCE syndrome mappings. The Master Mapping Reference Table (MMRT) was developed by the CDC to translate diagnostic codes across the ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM encoding systems to prepare for the transition. The DoD ESSENCE and MMRT syndrome definitions are presented in this analysis for comparison. 

Objective

The transition from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM requires evaluation of syndrome mappings to obtain a baseline for syndromic surveillance purposes. Two syndrome mappings are evaluated in this report.