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Wry Heat - by Jonathan DuHamel

Code V91 07XA burn due to water-skis on fire

by on Sep. 13, 2011, under Miscellaneous Stories

From the Federal bureaucracy run amok: Doctors and hospitals use about 18,000 codes to classify their treatments for insurers. Now the federal government is mandating an expanded code which features 140,000 classifications.

See the story in the Wall Street Journal here.

The title of this post is a real new code. Among some others are: W22.02XA, “walked into lamppost, initial encounter;” W22.02XD, “walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter;” and R46.1 “bizarre personal appearance.”

“There codes for injuries received while sewing, ironing, playing a brass instrument, crocheting, doing handcrafts, or knitting…”

The big question: will your insurance pay if the coders accidentally enter a W22.02XD before reporting a W22.02XA?

Is this part of President Obama’s new jobs program for medical coders? Your tax dollars at work.

 

 

 

 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2011 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous Stories. Tags for this post: , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  • leftfield

    Ok, what is the appropriate number of codes?  This strikes me as similar to the often heard complaints about taxpayer support for a scientific study into the mating habits of a Brazilian tree frog or some other similar venture whose value is not easily understood by the general public.  Even so, it should be easy for folks to understand that there has to be a system of classifying injury and illness that is accepted and understood across the industry.  This includes the insurance industry, health care, government and probably many others I can’t think of right now.    

  • Number Of Codes

    One would hope that the federal government wouldn’t get involved in a classification system.  Also, one would hope that a board of intelligent people could put something together that doesn’t look like unintelligible alphanumeric soup rather than relying on the government to do it (and do it badly).
     
    I’ll bet no one thought about usability when designing this monstrosity.  How does one navigate 140,000 possibilities without making a critical mistake that ends the life of the patient and also be able to select the correct entry in a timely fashion?  140,000 rows in a database is a lot of rows for many database designs – if you think medical systems are slow now – wait until this gets implemented.

  • Sharon

    Oh, Jonathan.  Find another more important issue to whine about.   Although you don’t realize it, because you seem to have no medical background and have no idea what you’re talking about, this is simply the ICD-9 medical coding system, in existence now for years, used for billing and statistical purposes.  The new ICD-10 version (your 140,000) is simply a refining of the ICD-9 to add more specificity.  It’s already well underway in Europe, and the US is in the process of implementing it now – and it ‘s going very well.  Calm down.  It’ll be fine.  It has nothing to do with the feds.  The ICD coding system exists outside the government.   Do a little research and get the story straight. 

  • Eric

    Actually, yhe ICD-10 code set is issued by the World Health Organization, not the US Federal Government (http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/). Its adoption is governed by professional organizations (HL7, AMA) as well as CMS for the abbreviated communication of clinically relvevant data. It predates this administration by 18 years. Although these are very funny codes, subsequent encounter does not refer to hitting a second lamp post, but having seen the doctor for a follow up on you initial incident of lampost / face interaction.

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