In this country, health insurance is no laughing matter (usually). But some of the new codes in the ICD-10 — which doctors use to diagnose patients for insurance billing purposes — are, in many cases, downright kooky.

The ICD-10 rollout, which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officially began on Oct. 1, basically upped the number of codes from 14,000 to as many as 80,000, notes Andrew Boyd, MD, an assistant professor of biomedical and health information sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The codes provide information to the insurance company about the patient’s injury, such as the exact diagnosis or the cause or location of the injury, helping insurers decide whether to reject or accept the claim. This dictates whether the doctor gets paid.

What’s the point of having so many codes? To increase diagnostic specificity — identifying your ear infection as a left, right, or bilateral ear infection, for example, rather than an “unspecified” one.

Even though not all doctors may agree that all this extra information is necessary, so far, the ICD-10 rollout appears to be going smoothly. “Just learning the new code seems to have happened,” says Boyd. But the real challenge still lies ahead: How will insurance companies determine whether your doctor’s visit was medically necessary? “[Your doctor] may pick ‘type 2 diabetes unspecified,’ but that may not be precise enough. So they deny the claim,” he says. As a result, doctors are going to have to relearn the ins and outs of billing, figuring out which codes get them paid — and which ones are usually denied.

We’re guessing doctors won’t have any trouble remembering these 12 bizarre diagnostic codes, though. Will they ever use them? Probably not … but these days, nothing is out of the realm of possibility.

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