Federally-Mandated Medical Coding Gums Up IT Ops

Lucas123 writes "The change over from a medical coding system in use since the 1970s to an updated version that adds more than 50,000 new 7-character codes is being compared to Y2K as an IT project that is nearly impossible to complete on time. ICD-10, which replaces ICD-9, adds far more granularity to medical diagnosis and treatment. For example, ICD-9 has one code for a finger amputation. In contrast, ICD-10 has a code for every finger and every section of every finger. An 'unfunded mandate,' the change over to ICD-10 codes is a multi-year project for hospitals, state Medicaid organizations, and insurance providers. The effort, which affects dozens of core systems, is taxing IT operational budgets at a time when shops are already under the gun to implement electronic health records."

Comments

Re:Good.

[iluvcapra]

This is a misconception. The United States has the ighest share of private spending per individual on health care, yet it has the highest costs and only middling health outcomes.

Every system in the developed world has a private spending component, usually through insurance and copays just like here, but most also have a government payer either as the single payer or more commonly as a backstop, last resort payer; all systems more firmly regulate costs and practices and all systems at least have independent boards to assure efficacy of treatments (we call those "death panels.") There's no empirical evidence that people make rational decisions about their own health care spending.