It’s now October and, perhaps appropriately, something wacky this way comes.
Beginning on Thursday, the entire US healthcare system switched over to the 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases. The latest edition includes more than 140,000 codes for medical complaints – a huge leap from the previous 18,000 – and some of them are just downright odd.
Wired trawled through the hundreds of thousands of new insurance codes to come up with 11 of the most bizarrely specific.
Our favorites are:
V95.4 Spacecraft accident injuring occupant—Choose from specific codes for: Unspecified spacecraft accident injuring occupant, Spacecraft crash injuring occupant, Forced landing of spacecraft injuring occupant, Spacecraft collision injuring occupant,
Spacecraft collision with any object, fixed, moveable or moving, Spacecraft fire injuring occupant, Spacecraft explosion injuring occupant
V86.43 Person injured while boarding or alighting from dune buggy
V90.27 Drowning and submersion due to falling or jumping from burning water-skis
W56 Contact with nonvenomous marine animal—Choose from: bitten, struck or other contact with dolphin, sea lion, orca, or other nonvenomous marine animal. (And yes, venomous marine mammals
do have their own category).
Other codes specify when the injury occurred:
Y93.J1 Activity, piano playing
Y93.81 Activity, refereeing a sports activity
Y93.84 Activity, sleeping
Still more specify where:
Y92.253 Opera house as the place of occurrence of the external cause
Y92.311 Squash court as the place of occurrence of the external cause
Y92.113 Driveway of children’s home and orphanage as the place of occurrence of the external cause
Wired points out that the new specificity of the system also causes headaches for the more common sources of injury. Something like a badly healed fracture, for example, could fall under any one of 2,595 different codes.
And with the new ICD-10 system, insurance carriers and hospitals are experiencing technical difficulties and warning patients to expect erroneous bills as companies work to iron out the kinks.
“This is a complex conversion that could initially lead to disruptions across the medical field,” Chris Miles, senior vice president of
Aon Hewitt’s health group, told
Forbes. “Providers may see overall delays in claims processing, and some individuals may have insurance claims that are denied for services that were provided, but not properly coded.”
