I found this coding article very entertaining and also provocative. If you are an HIM professional, you are probably already familiar with some of this but the perspective reflected in this blog is amusing nonetheless. If you have similar or new perspectives, please share with us at www.nearterm.com .
Burn Due to Water Skis on Fire? - There's an ICD-10 Code For That
Struck by a Turtle? Walked Into a Lamppost? Hurt While Crocheting? Burn Due to Water Skis on Fire? – There’s a Code for that.Don’t you hate those burns you get when your water skis catch on fire? Speaking of burning water skis, will your practice sink or swim through the ICD-10 transition? ICD-10 is a massive change and the impact cannot be understated for physicians and the financial health of their practices. GroupOne was there for our clients through 5010, for meaningful use and when they transitioned to paperless EHR systems. GroupOne’s RCM clients will not have to face the ICD-10 challenge alone.
In addition to providing ICD-10 training sessions for its providers, GroupOne’s partner practices will also have access to ICD-10 trained certified coders and reimbursement experts, who will monitor coding and documentation for proper ICD-10 compliance.
Furthermore, GroupOne will also provide its clients with access to clinical interface terminology technology. The tool interfaces the standard ICD-9-CM / ICD-10 driven terminology in the EHR search with an improved 260,000+ term search that expresses clinical intent while at the same time providing the correct coding for the intent. The tool solves the problem of forcing clinicians to remember and use the often awkward and cumbersome ICD-9/ ICD-10 coding language when documenting in an EHR. A client survey shows the 93% of users are more satisfied with EHR when this tool is utilized. The tool also aids with Meaningful Use Compliance and is already mapped to ICD-10. This tool greatly simplifies the transition to ICD-10 for clinicians eliminating much of the need to learn a completely new coding terminology.
Excerpts from an earlier Wall Street Journal article are included below. Some may find this interesting / amusing. ICD-10 is a good reason for medical practice to partner with a professional revenue cycle management (RCM) firm like GroupOne Health Source.
By ANNA WILDE MATHEWS - Wall Street Journal
Today, hospitals and doctors use a system of about 18,000 codes to describe medical services in bills they send to insurers. Apparently, that doesn't allow for quite enough nuance.
A Code for What Ails You
Search for diagnoses codes from the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, by typing in a keyword. We've provided a few to get you started.
A new federally mandated version will expand the number to around 140,000—adding codes that describe precisely what bone was broken, or which artery is receiving a stent.
It will also have a code for recording that a patient's injury occurred in a chicken coop. (See code.)
Indeed, health plans may never again wonder where a patient got hurt. There are codes for injuries in opera houses (see code), art galleries (see code), squash courts (see code) and nine locations in and around a mobile home (see codes), from the bathroom to the bedroom.
Health insurers, doctors and hospitals are bracing for chaos as they prepare to adopt a new federally mandated format for medical billing. Anna Wilde Mathews has details on Lunch Break.
Some doctors aren't sure they need quite that much detail. "Really? Bathroom versus bedroom?" says Brian Bachelder, a family physician in Akron, Ohio. "What difference does it make?"
The federal agencies that developed the system—generally known as ICD-10, for International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision—say the codes will provide a more exact and up-to-date accounting of diagnoses and hospital inpatient procedures, which could improve payment strategies and care guidelines. "It's for accuracy of data and quality of care," says Pat Brooks, senior technical adviser at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Billing experts who translate doctors' work into codes are gearing up to start using the new system in two years. They say the new detail is welcome in many cases. But a few aspects are also causing some head scratching.
W61.11XA: A code for injuries related to macaws.
Some codes could seem downright insulting: R46.1 is "bizarre personal appearance (see code)," while R46.0 is "very low level of personal hygiene (see code)."
It's not clear how many klutzes want to notify their insurers that a doctor visit was a W22.02XA, "walked into lamppost, initial encounter" (or, for that matter, a W22.02XD, "walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter").
Why are there codes for injuries received while sewing, ironing, playing a brass instrument, crocheting, doing handcrafts, or knitting—but not while shopping, wonders Rhonda Buckholtz, who does ICD-10 training for the American Academy of Professional Coders, a credentialing organization.
Code V91.07XA, which involves a "burn due to water-skis on fire (see codes)," is another mystery she ponders: "Is it work-related?" she asks. "Is it a trick skier jumping through hoops of fire? How does it happen?"
Much of the new system is based on a World Health Organization code set in use in many countries for more than a decade. Still, the American version, developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is considerably more fine-grained.
Y93.J4: A code for injuries received while playing brass instruments.
The WHO, for instance, didn't see the need for 72 codes about injuries tied to birds. But American doctors whose patients run afoul of a duck (see codes), macaw (see codes), parrot (see codes), goose (see codes), turkey (see codes) or chicken (see codes) will be able to select from nine codes for each animal, notes George Alex, an official at the Advisory Board Co., a health-care research firm.
There are 312 animal codes in all, he says, compared to nine in the international version. There are separate codes for "bitten by turtle" and "struck by turtle." (See codes.)
U.S. hospitals and insurers are bracing for possible hiccups when the move to ICD-10 happens on Oct. 1, 2013 (delayed until Oct 1, 2014), even though they've known it was coming since early 2009.
"You have millions of transactions flowing in the health-care system and this is an opportunity to mess them all up," says Jeremy Delinsky, chief technology officer for athenahealth Inc.
Medicare officials say they believe many big insurers and hospital systems are making preparations, but there may be some issues with smaller ones that won't be ready.
With the move to ICD-10, the one code for suturing an artery will become 195 codes, designating every single artery, among other variables, according to OptumInsight, a unit of UnitedHealth Group Inc. A single code for a badly healed fracture could now translate to 2,595 different codes, the firm calculates. Each signals information including what bone was broken, as well as which side of the body it was on.
Some companies hope to grab business from the shift. One medical-coding website operator, Find A Code LLC, has created a series of YouTube videos with the tagline, "Yeah, there's a code for that." Snow White biting the poisoned apple, the firm says, may be a case of T78.04, "anaphylactic shock due to fruits and vegetables (see codes)." On April 1, the company posted a document with the secret "X-codes" to describe medical conditions stemming from encounters with aliens.
Other coding cognoscenti spot possible hidden messages in the real codes. The abbreviation some use for the new system itself, I10, is also a code for high blood pressure. Several codes involving drainage devices end in "00Z." Then there are two of the codes describing sex-change operations that end in N0K1 and M0J0. "You could see it ripple through the room as people said, 'nookie and mojo!'" says Kathryn DeVault, who has been teaching ICD-10 classes for the American Health Information Management Association. "Was it purposeful? We don't know."
