I'm mind-boggled by the new disease classification codes about to be implemented. There won't be any option about using them - if doctors want to get paid, they're going to have to use the new codes. The only question is, how on earth will they ever be able to figure them all out?
The Weekly Standard reports:
Ever considered suicide by jellyfish? Have you ended up in the hospital after being injured during the forced landing of your spacecraft? Or been hurt when you were sucked into the engine of an airplane or when your horse-drawn carriage collided with a trolley?
Chances are slim.
But should any of these unfortunate injuries befall you after October 1, 2014, your doctor, courtesy of the federal government, will have a code to record it. On that date, the United States is scheduled to implement a new system for recording injuries, medical diagnoses, and inpatient procedures called ICD-10—the 10th version of the International Classification of Diseases propagated by the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. So these exotic injuries, codeless for so many years, will henceforth be known, respectively, as T63622A (Toxic effect of contact with other jellyfish, intentional self-harm, initial encounter), V9542XA (Forced landing of spacecraft injuring occupant, initial encounter), V9733XA (Sucked into jet engine, initial encounter), and V80731A (Occupant of animal-drawn vehicle injured in collision with streetcar, initial encounter).
The coming changes are vast. The number of codes will explode—from 17,000 under the current system to 155,000 under the new one, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
There's more at the link.
Obamacare's already imposed huge new regulatory and administrative burdens on medical practitioners. Now they're going to have to cope with an almost tenfold increase in the number and complexity of the reporting codes they have to use. How much time will they have left over to diagnose and treat patients, do you suppose?
Peter
7 comments:
Ah, you miss the brilliance that is Obamacare! No doctor can handle this sort of thing, they will have to hire a reporting code specialist. No such persons exist, you say? Obama is requesting billions for job retraining, so that people out of work can learn of his great work. Unemployment will plunge! All hail the Lightworker!
/sarc
What's the code for "Head exploded due to government over-regulation?"
". . . V9733XA (Sucked into jet engine, initial encounter),. . .)
Last time I checked being sucked into a jet engine required a crew from haz-mat to squeegee up the pieces.
+1 what Judy said
Though I have to note that the chunks and smears in the compressor blades is the major post-encounter difficulty to be dealt with usually.
Do they have a code for injuries sustained by "pitchfork stabbing (initial encounter)" or "tar and feathering (initial encounter)"? They might need to.
As I understand, the IDC-10 changes were in the pipeline long before ObamaKare.
Its a coding scheme that has to be updated at intervals to reflect new treatment methods. Although the jellyfish things is a bit of a stretch...
And of course I may be wrong.... :)
J
The original purpose of the IDC system was for world health statistics and epidemiology. It's great for that sort of thing. But then the bureaucrats saw it and said, "Hey! We can use this for [thing] and it's got everything we might possibly need, assuming we add this, and this, and . . ."
LittleRed1
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