Additional diagnosis must be in accordance with the ICD-10-AM Australian Coding Standards. Generally, external cause codes, place of occurrence codes, activity codes, morphology codes and supplementary codes for chronic conditions will be included in the string of additional diagnosis codes. In some data collections these codes may also be copied into specific fields.
The diagnosis can include a disease, condition (including chronic), injury, poisoning, sign, symptom, abnormal finding, complaint, or other factor influencing health status.
Additional diagnoses give information on the conditions that are significant in terms of treatment required, investigations needed and resources used during the episode of care.
The supplementary codes for chronic conditions (U78-U88) are for temporary use in Australia to generate data which will be utilised to review the coding of additional diagnoses.