In the Trenches: Week One of ICD-10

Welcome back, blog fans. Sorry for the prolonged radio silence, but as some of you may have heard (or not, if you don’t happen to work in the medical field) this past Thursday, October 1, 2015 marked the official switch-over to ICD-10, and to say things have been a little hectic is like saying Congress is a little contentious. What am I talking about, you say? Diagnosis coding. At the end of my residency, the program sent the third year residents to a two-day seminar on practice management. Knowing I was about to go out on my own, I paid close attention, and ending up being able to use a great deal of what I learned. When discussing the insurance claim form, the divided it up into sections based on the “Who” (demographics, ID numbers), the “What” (procedure codes, copyrighted by the AMA, known as “Common Procedural Codes” or CPT), the “where” (to send the money: my name and address at the bottom), and of course the “why”, or the diagnosis. Every possible thing that can conceivably go wrong with the human body can be assigned a code to identify to third payer parties the “why”* of any given medical service. Not just every disease, condition, injury, or complication, but any possible reason to go to the doctor (or in modern parlance, “to encounter the health care system”) must also be coded. Everything from a school physical to a preoperative H&P has its own code. My favorite over th...
Source: Musings of a Dinosaur - Category: Primary Care Authors: Tags: Medical Source Type: blogs