October 1, 2015: A day that will live in health care infamy

October 1, 2015 is a huge day to the medical community.  It is a day that will live in infamy.  It is the object of dread, of diaphoresis, of doom.  October 1 is ICD-10 day.  This view was further bolstered when I went to the CMS (Government Medicare) website; there was actually a doomsday countdown timer at the top of the page. For those still unaware, ICD-10 is the 10th iteration of the coding taxonomy used for diagnosis in our lovely health care system.  This system replaces ICD-9, which one would expect from a numerological standpoint (although the folks at Microsoft jumped from Windows 8 to Windows 10, so anything is possible).  This change should be cause for great celebration, as  ICD-9 was miserably inconsistent and idiosyncratic, having no codes describing weakness of the arms, while having several for being in a horse-drawn vehicle that was struck by a streetcar.  Really. But, as Abe Lincoln may have said, better the devil you know than the one you don’t.  We all got used to the stupidity of ICD-9, and, like the crazy neighbor who puts huge inflatables of the Santa Maria in their yard on Columbus day, we learned to tolerate its eccentricities.  It’s better than having an axe murderer or hospital administrator in that house.  Unfortunately, the folks over at ICD Inc. got overly zealous in their desire for completeness, increasing the number of codes from the 17,000 in ICD-9 to over 90,000 in ICD-10.  It’s as if that neighbor not only a...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Physician Primary care Source Type: blogs