Posted on 02/15/2014 9:22:20 AM PST by Innovative
Reolubin is one of the country’s 186,000 medical coders who work in the back offices of hospitals. It’s her job to translate doctors’ scribbles into diagnosis codes. Those are sent to insurance companies, which use them to determine how much to pay hospitals for care.
With 14,000 codes, ICD-9 seems puny by comparison. The new manual explodes that code set to 68,000 much more granular and detailed terms to define — very exactly and specifically — what ails us.
There are different numbers for getting struck or bitten by a turkey (W61.42 or W61.43). There are codes for injuries caused by squirrels (W53.21) and getting hit by a motor vehicle while riding an animal (V80.919), spending too much time in a deep-freeze refrigerator (W93.2) and a large toe that has gone unexpectedly missing (Z89.419).
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Doctors have to spend money on administrators to handle this and have to see more patients, resulting in less time per patient, just to pay them, to satisfy the government bureaucracy.
More "benefits" of Obamacare...
In before the squirrel grenade link!
Live gerbil inside rectum ? RG1 (Richard Gere-1).
Question about medical coding:
Have you heard of a scenario in which the attending physician/health care specialist is deliberately vague about a diagnosis because to be more specific (and accurate) in coding would require a new protocol and more troublesome paperwork?
My first job at the hospital for which I worked (for 20 years) required me to refer occasionally to the ICD-9,the version before the current one.This volume contained about 20 pages of just fevers...the names of some of which were hysterical.But admittedly,experiencing the fevers themselves probably wasn’t much fun.But my favorite one,name-wise,was “Bwamba Fever”.
A battle hardened big-city ER nurse I once worked with told me once of all the "foreign objects" that she's seen inserted in people's private areas.My favorite one was light bulbs.
Noooooo, but there are separate codes for bites to the left buttock and right buttock...
Squirrels, nature’s little speed bumps.
But seriously, do squirrels carry rabies? I’m pretty sure turkeys and moose do not. I know that in some states squirrels are vectors for the plague. I’ve watched way too much “House.”
Koro is also known as shrinking penis, and it is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The syndrome occurs worldwide, and mass hysteria of genital-shrinkage anxiety has a history in Africa, Asia, and Europe. In the United States and Europe, the syndrome is commonly known as genital retraction syndrome. The condition can be diagnosed through psychological assessment along with physical examination to rule out genuine disorders of the genitalia that could be causing true retraction.[
What about gophers? Do they get their own code?
I talked to one, too. She said the gay “patients” were the worst with inserted objects they couldn’t get out.
The Use It or Lose It Syndrome.
The CS series (as in Carl Spackler).
ICD-10 has been coming for YEARS... looks like it might actually happen this time
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