Posted on 03/07/2013 5:29:17 AM PST by SJackson
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Reason #41 Health Care is So Expensive: Medical Codes for Being Struck by a Turtle at the Opera
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On March 5, 2013 @ 12:43 pm In The Point | 7 Comments
But no, I’m just kidding. There are separate medical codes for being hurt at the opera and being struck by a turtle.
The U.S. health care system is ramping up to implement a massive new coding system called ICD-10. It’s a bland name for a system capable of coding thousands of colorful injuries. A full 68,000 to be exact, as opposed to the 13,000 under the current ICD-9.
Take these, straight from ICD-10:
Hurt at the opera: Y92253
Stabbed while crocheting: Y93D1
Walked into a lamppost: W2202XA
Walked into a lamppost, subsequent encounter: W2202XD
Submersion due to falling or jumping from crushed water skis: V9037XA
This isn’t just a Dave Barry essay, it’s the cost of health care.
Medical coder is an actual profession and most places have them now. Quadrupling the number of codes means that more codes will be needed and that adds even more to the cost of health care.
Classification was supposed to make health care less expensive and more streamlined, but like most data initiatives, it just adds cost and complexity to the system.
And the people who benefit from that make money by adding complexity, which is the head of a medical coding consulting company (you can see how bad things are when there is a consulting company for the codes) tries to justify the absurdity.
Let’s say you’re in some kind of accident that involves an insurance claim — whether it’s a vehicle or boating accident, or even if you’ve been bitten by an animal. It’s not enough to say, “I was hit by a car” or “an animal bit me.” The insurance company needs to know exactly how that injury occurred so when they go back and look at how to pay out a claim, it helps the patient have their story told properly and allows for potentially better benefits and care.
Does anyone actually benefit from an entire profession that breaks down Injured in Animal Encounter to 600 categories of classification? Besides the people who make money classifying it. The bureaucracy expands and the cost of everything goes up.
NEWSHOUR: Flaming water skis. That’s another colorful one. When would that ever come into play?
HOLLY CASSANO: Well let’s think. Flaming water skis might occur if someone was trying to do some kind of a stunt in Hollywood (the movie “Yogi Bear” comes to mind). maybe they’re putting some kind of ignition fluid onto the water skis for a movie. If I was a coder in an emergency room in Los Angeles, it’s quite possible I’d see something like that.
Yogi Bear was an animated movie. But maybe there should be a code for animators hurting their wrists while moving around 3D sprites of a bear on flaming water skis. I know my wrists are hurting while typing this. Someone get me a code. Pronto!
By utilizing ICD-10 and being more specific about what has gone on with that patient, a doctor in Florida can help someone who was bitten by a rattlesnake out west a few months before. The patient is probably suffering some ongoing issues from the venom, so when another provider goes into their records, they can see: “OK, they were bitten by a rattlesnake, here was the severity of that injury, and let me see what I can do to treat them more specifically,” — which is a lot more helpful than dealing with the unknown.
Or the attending physician could just write into the medical chart. “Patient bitten by a rattlesnake.” But that wouldn’t add six degrees of complexity and ten degrees of expense to the process.
NEWSHOUR: This is a big change for doctors, hospitals and especially professional coders. Just how big is the lift here to implement this new system?
HOLLY CASSANO: It is a very big undertaking but I feel at this point it’s more from an IT (information-technology) standpoint, and it’s more or less of a challenge depending upon what type of office system a provider currently has. There actually are some providers out there who are still on paper, believe it or not. For those individuals, it’s going to be a huge undertaking because they not only have to convert all of that paper into an electronic health record system, they then also have to find one that can handle ICD-10. There are also vendors who you can outsource your coding to, if say, you feel you need assistance during the transition. There are companies that specialize in assisting providers, hospitals and other health care organizations with streamlining their coding operations. For organizations that have an electronic health record system of some sort — which is most — they need to assess and review the vendor’s ICD-10 implementation plan in order to determine if that vendor can handle transitioning ICD-10 into their current system.
If you can make it through that entire paragraph, you have some idea of Reason 41 of why your health care is so much more expensive than it used to be.
It may, prove to some degree, during the initial transition to have some hiccups on the provider side of things. But if they are armed with the proper coding tools out there, it should be somewhat seamless. Coding is not done from memory, so they will utilize the same types of coding tools they do now for ICD-9. If you have a tool like that, which is what I currently use, it’s not going to be that difficult. You just have to plug in “injured in opera house” and the code will pop up.
Here’s a crazy idea, what if we walked this back all the way to “Doctor writes stuff in chart, chart goes into medical record, physicians have access to medical record”?
Tragically the entire profession of coding might go up in a wisp of smoke and a doctor’s visit might end up costing 20 dollars less.
NEWSHOUR: Is there any part of you that thinks this may be going overboard, like distinguishing between an injury in a mobile home’s bathroom vs. the garden or foyer?
HOLLY CASSANO: Well, yeah (laughing). I think that some of these codes really may or may not be necessary. But part of the problem with ICD-9 is annually, due to various strange incidents or new disease processes, the governing bodies and decision-makers in health care — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association and others — are tasked with looking to create new codes from providers and others requests in the health care community in order to report these strange and/or new incidents and diseases. Which is one of the areas ICD-10 will assist with and cover more of the bases.
As Ancient China could have told us, bureaucratic complexity is the enemy of getting anything done.
Making health care cheaper requires wiping out 90 percent of the bureaucracy that acts as the middle man between providers and patients.
Hurt at the opera: Y92253
Stabbed while crocheting: Y93D1
Walked into a lamppost: W2202XA
Walked into a lamppost, subsequent encounter: W2202XD
Submersion due to falling or jumping from crushed water skis: V9037XA
And subcodes for each
W56Contact with nonvenomous marine animal
W56.0Contact with dolphin
W56.01Bitten by dolphin
W56.01XA…… initial encounter
W56.01XD…… subsequent encounter
W56.01XS…… sequela
W56.02Struck by dolphin
W56.09Other contact with dolphin
Then it's on to sharks and orcas
Wait a sec, there, Greenfield! You ask what’s the medical code for “Being Struck by a Turtle at the Opera”?
Then you talk about separate codes for being struck by a turtle OR getting hurt at the opera.
But what happens if a flying turtle lands on me while I’m at the opera? We mustn’t ignore or make light of these potentially tragic events that could affect many families with Post Turtle Strike At Opera Syndrome.
I thought ICD-9 was bad! I had a girlfriend many years ago who did medical coding from home and made a pretty decent wage doing so. She’d receive about 10 hours of dictated orders through a secure site, login to the consulting firm VPN, put on her headphones, and get to work.
She showed me the reference book and websites she used. They were pretty intense. I’d ask for her thoughts on the whole process and her reply was, “Well, it keeps me employed.”
This is Obama’s plan: employ the unemployable. Learn some codes, push some buttons, listen to personal information on patients, even though they’re coded (or at least they used to be).
Yep, I was a ICD.9 coder and one of my favorites was “pecked by birds”. I could code anything put in front of me.
Thank you for sharing the ridiculous side of Diagnosis codes.
On a more practical side, the insurance companies are pushing hard to “inform” their customers of the new “benefits” of ObamaCare, one of which is “preventive care”.
From Blue Cross: “Preventive Care Benefits: The law prohibits cost-sharing for preventive services, including immunizations, breast cancer screening and other recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and other agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, for plan years beginning on or after Sept. 23, 2010.”
What this means is any ObamaCare qualified plan, MUST include preventive care as part of the premium paid, and you cannot be charge for it as an additional expense. (hence why the premiums are skyrocketing).
Unfortunately, A LOT of doctors don’t know how to bill “preventive care” even when a person asks for it. Then the person gets stuck with medical bills on top of the sky-high premiums already paid. All because the doctor “decides” it is not “preventive”.
Blue Cross touts “preventive care” as a “cost-cutting approach to health care”. Yes, indeed. but for whom?
This all began back in the Shamanistic Age before we had reading, writing and paper. Your village shaman needed to create signs like stars, bars, circles and whorls so he could explain his logic and the interest of the gods in your welfare.
Early shamen made up their own codes ~ but by about 12000 BC they'd begun STANDARDIZING the symbols, and that's where the medical codification system came into existence. It has persisted through time parallel to the creation of written language, keyboards and paper.
At some point the traditionalists are going to GIVE IT UP and flip on the computers and check out how fast and easy it is to just type in a general description which is then analyzed by the computer to associate the injury or event with prior decisions or standards regarding payments due.
A competing technology called FORMS has also had an impact in this area, and for the most part with the use of computers we no longer need special forms to collect relevant information.
My wife is an NP.
With paper records you had to write the codes out; so you had to know all of these more obscure codes to get paid - so no one ever did. It was just too much trouble. (Simple explanation)
This = Less billing fees.
BUT with electronic records(!) the machine ascribes the correct codes.
MORE billing! Wheeee!
Medicare/MedicAid is reporting that as more Docs switch to electronic records the payment costs are doubling/tripling. Costs are going up!
Democrats are dumb: Example Q34545454#$5454
Cost shifting.
The genesis of all this was Medicare fraud. Unscrupulous providers ripping off the system by upcharging for procedures that were not exactly in line with the truth.
The bureaucratic response of course was to fine-tune the coding system down to specific codes for even the silliest or most remote possibilities.
So the cause of this is Government, all the way round.
Your wife is an “NP”??
Not being in the medical profession, all I can think of is “Nasty Person” — but that certainly can’t be right.
Nurse Practitioner?
struck by a turtle, but your too late
you give er, somehting, a bad name!
Cut finger.
Slicing bagel.
Plain.
Sesame.
Poppy.
etc.
Awww. I was hoping that W56.03-W56.08 existed. Those could have been interesting because dolphins are pervs.
Well, maybe ICD-11 will fulfill my prurient interests.
You are correct. I read an article the other day that said state laws were being changed in many states to allow NPs to open their own office without working with a doctor. They are already able to do this in many states. NPs do get training beyond their RN training.
This will only be a bad thing for patients when they start acting like doctors instead of nurses. Several times nurses have saved family members and even diagnosed things the doctor was having a hard time diagnosing. I know some nurses I would rather have in charge of my care than many doctors.
This subject is about as funny as cancer to most physicians. The task of converting to ICD10 codes is so complex and so fraught with chaos that CMS RECOMENDS ALL HEALTH CARE PRACTITIONERS HAVE AT LEAST 6 MONTHS OF CAPITAL RESERVES to get through the transition. One of the very senior officials at CMS has admitted that there would be very little if any monies received by docs during this 6 month transition.
Gee Whiz, I used to worry about getting hit with the fat lady’s helmut while she sang. Now I must also look for Ninja turtles.
No, you’re right.
....ooohh.... that joke will cost me.....
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