Background:

Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is a heterogeneous group of diseases that affects pulmonary interstitium.

Material and methods:

An observational, retrospective and descriptive study was conducted in patients discharged from January 2010 to June 2015, with the codes ICD-10: (J67) hypersensitivity pneumonitis, (J82) eosinophilia unclassified, (J84) other interstitial lung diseases, and the different numerals available for each of them. To evaluate if clinical diagnosis reported in the interstitial lung diseases service were similar to ICD coding used.

Results:

We included 1,279 patients, classifying them according to the physician's diagnosis, the most common diseases reported was: ILD 538 (42%), HP 223 (17.4%), IPF 185 (14.4%), unclassifiable pulmonary fibrosis (UPF) 155 (12.1%) and NSIP 95 (7.4%), while the ICD-10 grouped them indistinctly.

Conclusion:

The results obtained in this study corroborated that ICD-10 code using in ILD is insufficient for all the diagnoses included in this group so it is necessary unify the codes to perform epidemiological studies in the future.