ICD-10 Adoption and the True Burden of Short Bowel Syndrome With Alan Buchman, MD, MSPH
Accurately defining the population of patients with short bowel syndrome (SBS) and intestinal failure has long been a challenge in gastroenterology. In an effort to bring greater clarity to the field, Alan Buchman MD, MSPH, a professor of Clinical Surgery and Medical Director of the Intestinal Rehabilitation and Transplant Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago and director of gastroenterology at Elevance Health, led the introduction of new, more specific ICD-10-CM codes for SBS, along with corresponding updates to World Health Organization ICD-11 classifications. His recent real-world US claims analysis presented at the ASPEN 2026 Nutrition Science and Practice Conference examined how widely those codes have been adopted and what that adoption, or lack thereof, reveals about disease burden and clinical practice. Key Interview Time Stamps 0:00:00 What prompted this analysis of ICD code adoption in short bowel syndrome? 0:01:17 Key findings 0:03:33 Understanding reasons for variability in code adoption 0:04:36 The potential benefits of improved coding accuracy