ICD10 Guideline for drugs and substances

This page contains an ICD10 Coding Guideline for ICD10 collection. See ICD10 coding guidelines for similar pages.

Coding in ICD10 of Issues Related to Drugs and Substances

There are 6 categories of ICD10 codes related to drugs/biologics/agents/substances -- they are DISTINCT and it’s important to distinguish between them.

• Category:Overdose
• Category:Adverse effect
• Category:Poisoning by non-pharmaceuticals
• Category:Acute intoxication
• Category:Addiction
• Category:Withdrawal

• While many of the specific drugs or agents or substances have codes that fall under multiple of the categories (e.g. opioids), there is not perfect symmetry, i.e. there may be an individual code for a given agent in one category, while for another category that agent may instead go into a wastebasket code. Benzodiazepines are one such example.