Injured by spacecraft

I came across this little morsel and just had to share.

Injured By a Spacecraft? There?s a Diagnostic Code for That - Health Blog - WSJ

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July 15, 2008, 6:09 PM ET
ByJacob Goldstein

July 15, 2008, 6:09 PM ET
ByJacob Goldstein

So we?ve got this patient here who was injured in this spaceship accident. You know, just a routine, uh, orbital mishap. But how do we account for that? Oh, right, it?s ICD-9 code E845 ? ?Accident involving spacecraft.?

Apropos of nothing in particular, this billing code popped up on a couple of medical blogs last week (KevinMD and Dr. Secretwave101). Intrigued, we did a little reporting.

This extended definition notes that the code includes ?launching pad accident,? but excludes ?effects of weightlessness in spacecraft,? which has its own code (E928.0).

ICD (International Classification of Diseases) codes are the basic international health codes that exist for just about everything (as this spaceship thing suggests). They?re used both for billing purposes and for tracking trends in public health.

A spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, one of the key agencies that deals with the codes in this country, told us that E845 was in the current version of U.S. ICD-9 code when it was first published in 1979. The code was created by the World Health Organization as part of ICD-9, the spokesman said. Other places in the world use ICD-10, we?ve stuck with ICD-9-CM.

A little creative Googling turned up a citation of the same code all the way back in 1966.

Just because a code exists, it doesn?t mean anybody?s ever used it. ?Whether someone was injured [by a spacecraft] or not was immaterial because somebody thought, ?What If?? ? Sheri Poe Bernard, a VP at the American Academy of Professional Coders told us.

It didn?t take much to get Poe talking about all the strange things that have their own codes. Bite of a nonvenomous arthropod. Dog bite. Rat bite. Scorpion sting. ?A centipede has its own code ? E905.4,? she said. ?Accident caused by paintball gun, E922.5 Accident by fireworks, explosion, E923.0″.

If you can think of a way to be killed or injured, there?s a code for it. ?Terrorism has all kinds of codes associated, involving marine weapons, aircraft, explosions, conflagration,? she said. ?Terrorism involving nuclear weapons, E979.5; biological weapons E979.6; chemical weapons E979.7.?

Uh, thanks Sheri. If you need us, we?ll be huddling under our desk, fearing for our lives. What?s the ICD code for that?

Injured by spacecraft