The ICD-10 list may be inadequate.
ABC News reports an actor was hospitalized after his foot became caught in an
elevator raising the stage during a performance of the Broadway show
"Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark."
As a connoisseur of ICD-10 codes, I decided to see if I could
classify this injury correctly.
To my surprise, I could not.
The only codes having to do with elevators are the W303XXs Contact with grain storage elevator.
Since I had once read that the codes were originally
developed in Europe, I even searched for "lift." But all I got were Y93F2 Activity, caregiving, lifting and W240XXs Contact with lifting devices, not
elsewhere classified.
Contact with lifting
devices, not elsewhere classified hardly seems appropriate for elevators,
which are so common. People are frequently hurt on them or by falling down
their shafts. All you get when you search "shaft" are hundreds of
codes dealing with bones.
We know that ICD-10 has given us such gems as
V982XXA
Accident to, on or involving ice yacht,
V9542XA Forced landing
of spacecraft injuring occupant and
[Click on the links to read my comments about those codes.]
So how is it that there's no code for contact with an
elevator? For that matter, what about injury during a Broadway show? Surely both
elevator and Broadway show injuries are much more common than say V8022XA Occupant of animal-drawn vehicle
injured in collision with pedal cycle.
Filippe Vasconcellos (@fvguima), a Twitter follower, suggested W230XXA Caught, crushed, jammed, or pinched
between moving objects, initial encounter, but it is not clear that there was
more than one moving object. And the stated aim of ICD-10 is to introduce much
more specificity into the codes for better tracking of things like injuries.
What we need is even more codes. Maybe we need to get going
on ICD-11 sooner than we thought.
9 comments:
"What we need is even more codes. Maybe we need to get going on ICD-11 sooner than we thought."
Do you have a death wish Skep? ;) I know people leaving jobs because of 10 ... mention 11 and they'll hunt you down. LOL.
Does ICD-10 have a code for "carpal tunnel syndrome from posting on Skeptical Scalpel too often"?
Anon, I was kidding. Don't come after me.
Artiger, they don't, but maybe they should.
Perhaps naively, I have assumed that the point of ICD coding of events is not the creation of data, rather it is the consumption. Ideally, those responsible for expanding the list of ICD codes would have kept that in mind. It certainly doesn't look like it though. What do the ICD codes get used for other than research? Surely no one plans to submit a bill based on V9027XA... or do they? I'm pretty sure any research project they may have imagined for that code isn't going to pan out.
SS: Found in today's news--is there a code for this: Doctors remove fork from penis of 70-year-old Australian man??
Reference:
Aidu, K., Chung, A., Mulcahy, M. An Unusual Urethral Foreign Body.
International Journal of Surgery Case Reports
(2013),http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijscr.2013.07.017
Anon, it is my understanding that at some point, all billing done by docs and hospitals will have to use ICD-10 codes.
DD, thanks for that link. Fork does not appear in my list of ICD-10 codes. I think they will have to add that one to the next version.
when the patient woke up,he said "what the fork happened."
Is there a code for "Breathing, Failure to"?
I don't think so.
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