For those that think Obamacare is a fist-clenching, jaw-tightening, eye-rolling daily dosage of headline news, an even bigger non-Obamacare headache has yet to fall in the hands of medical providers.
Physicians are in for a real treat come October 2015, as they will be required to comply with an upgraded coding system – formally known as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) – used for patient diagnoses and inpatient procedures.
For roughly 30 years, third-party payers have used the 9th edition of this coding system (ICD-9) to communicate with and reimburse medical providers. The 10th edition has been established by the World Health Organization for almost a decade and still awaits full implementation in the U.S.. The Obama administration fully supports this massive transition, claiming that the new coding system will be more sophisticated and efficient for the medical community.
Under ICD-10, the number of codes will exponentially increase from 17,000 to 155,000. Wow.
Now, some new codes certainly are necessary due to medical innovation and new diagnoses. But after reading Stephen Hayes’s article on the matter in The Weekly Standard, some are just plain hilarious.
Check out the full article here.
