Hospitals use medical billing codes to succinctly describe to an insurance company the type of medical services that a patient received. There used to be around 18,000 codes that doctor’s could select from. This is being updated to around 140,000 codes. It seems that there really is an insurance billing code for absolutely everything.
Federal agencies have developed a system called ICD-10. It stands for International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision. This update greatly expands the number of billing codes that doctors can use to describe to a health insurance company what, exactly, a person was treated for. It is hoped that this could improve insurance payment strategies, and improve quality of care.
The new version of the billing codes will start being used sometime in the next two years. I would imagine it would take some time to learn about the 140,000 codes that are now part of the system. Some of the new code descriptions are quite bizarre.
There are several codes for injuries related to paintball guns, pellet guns, and BB guns. You got injured by a BB gun or pellet gun? That code would be listed on your insurance claim as E922.4. What if it was a paintball gun that caused your injury? Then the code on the claim form would be E922.5.
Other codes describe where you were at, or what you were doing, when you got injured. They also can describe exactly what kind of animal caused your injury. Let’s say you got injured while you were at an Opera house. The code for that is Y92253.
You texted someone and walked into a lamppost? That code is W2202XA. What if you didn’t learn to pay attention to where you are going from that experience? The second time you get injured from walking into a lamppost, it will be indicated by the code W2202XD, instead. There is a different code if you manage to hurt yourself from walking into a lamppost a third time.
I live in a mobile home. If I get hurt while at home, there are ten different codes that can be used to indicate where, exactly, I was at when I got injured. Was I in the kitchen, the bedroom, or the bathroom? Did it happen when I was standing in my driveway?
The code Y92026 perplexes me. That one is for “swimming-pool of mobile home as the place of occurrence of the external cause”. Have you ever seen a mobile home that had it’s own swimming pool? I never have.
Snow white takes a bite of a poisoned apple, and ends up in the ER. The doctors use the code T78.04, which stands for “anaphylactic shock due to fruits and vegetables” to describe what happened to her.
Grandma gets bitten by the Big Bad Wolf? The code for that is W5581Xa, which stands for “Bitten by other mammals, initial encounter”. A tornado picks up Dorothy’s house. If she got injured in the process, the billing code for that is X371XXA, which means “Tornado, initial encounter”. There’s a code for everything!
Image by Amy Moss on Flickr