According to the report, the codes will allow providers to describe diagnoses and procedures in much more detail, including the location of a patient’s injury and the specific artery that receives a stent. Some codes are so specific as to seem ludicrous to providers: Rhonda Buckholtz, who does ICD-10 training for the American Academy for Professional Coders, puzzled over code V91.07XA, which involves a “burn due to water-skis on fire.”
There are 312 codes for injuries involving animals in the American version of ICD-10, compared to nine in the international version. These include separate codes for “bitten by turtle” and “struck by turtle.”
The transition to ICD-10 is expected to disrupt medical coding processes for a few months following the Oct. 1, 2013 implementation date, as providers, payors and facilities adapt to the new specificity.
One medical coding website operator, Find A Code, has shown a sense of humor over the transition in its parody of Apple’s “there’s an app for that” slogan. The company created a series of YouTube videos with the tagline, “Yeah, there’s a code for that.”
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