Records the patient’s preexisting medical conditions, factors influencing health status, and/or complications for the treatment of this cancer. Both are considered secondary diagnoses. Preexisting medical conditions, factors influencing health status, and/or complications may affect treatment decisions and influence patient outcomes. Information on comorbidities is used to adjust outcome statistics when evaluating patient survival and other outcomes. Complications may be related to the quality of care. ICD-10-CM codes are 7 characters long, where each character represents an aspect of the condition or procedure: the 7 characters indicate 'section', 'body system', 'root operation', 'body part', 'approach', 'device', and 'qualifier', respectively (see ICD-10-PCS Reference Manual for additional information).
The current Comorbidity and complication items are based on ICD-9-CM codes and only allow 5 characters, with the introduction of ICD-10-CM in to common use the NAACCR transmission record needs to be able to carry these new codes (that are longer in length and different in structure).