After you see your doctor, usually he/she will hand you some paper work one of which is typically a yellow sheet with a description of the details of the patient’s visit. For payment purposes, the description includes a number or code to indicate among other things the recognized fee that he will receive for his professional services. Coding is very important for all involved since for one thing in the end it will determine the damage to either your or a third party’s bank account. There are medical professionals who make a career of dealing with these numbers or codes. A mistake can bring about a costly surprise or a return of the bill to the provider.
Recently I read a news article in the WSJ (9/13/11) by Anne Wilde Matthews about a new (revised) federally mandated billing system called the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision or ICD-10 which will go into effect October 1, 2013, a good day for MD retirements. The new system is based on a plan adopted by the World Health Organization currently used in many countries. Today, hospitals and doctors use a system that has about 16,000 codes; the new one will swell to 140,000. As you might well imagine the system will become extremely precise and exact with the addition of many newer codings. For example, one new code describing a patient’s injury will indicate that the injury occurred in a chicken coop always important medical information. And there are more interesting codes to come into use. There are 72 codes about injuries tied to birds.
Presently there is one code for suturing an artery; there will be 195 codes in the new guidelines. For a badly healed fracture now coded by one number, the new listing reportedly includes 2,595 codes.
And of course there are those who have added a personal touch to the coding. One stated that there is even a code for Snow White biting into the poisoned apple, “anaphylactic shock due to fruits and vegetables.”
One can imagine the coding clerk as he/she tries to match a doctor’s illegible diagnosis description to one of the additional hundreds of listed codes.
Is there a code for mental fatigue while working in this specific area?
Of course when you read the words “federally mandated” that should give you a clue as to its complexity.
On another medically related topic, I heard about a secretary who had just begun working in the office of a local urologist years ago who failed to arrange for a requested circumcision procedure. When asked why, she stated that since the hospital was (then) affiliated with the Catholic Church, the operation could not be performed for religious reasons, so she did not schedule it. She confused it with another then denied opposite gender procedure. She soon learned the difference.
It seems that with the new coding system, you will be covered for any of 140,000 reasons although having a heart attack because of winning the lottery might not be one… yet.
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Bill Lee, PO Box 128, Hamer, SC 29547
