Yup, and as others have mentioned ICD-10 is worse.
There are also CPT codes that specify the procedures and diagnostic techniques that doctors and other healthcare providers do.
Insurance is then a mapping from ICD codes to allowed CPT codes. Good luck getting that information from your insurance company, however. Once I had a claim denied because someone transposed two digits in an ICD-9 code, and the treatment obviously didn't make sense. The insurance company couldn't tell me what the codes were - just that it was not an approved treatment for the reported condition. That took a lot of painful debugging to resolve.
Oh, and CPT codes are copyrighted by the AMA [1]. If you want to use them you have to pay licensing fees. Too bad it's not usually a case of "want to use" but instead "must use." I'm not sure if ICD codes are copyrighted.
There are also CPT codes that specify the procedures and diagnostic techniques that doctors and other healthcare providers do.
Insurance is then a mapping from ICD codes to allowed CPT codes. Good luck getting that information from your insurance company, however. Once I had a claim denied because someone transposed two digits in an ICD-9 code, and the treatment obviously didn't make sense. The insurance company couldn't tell me what the codes were - just that it was not an approved treatment for the reported condition. That took a lot of painful debugging to resolve.
Oh, and CPT codes are copyrighted by the AMA [1]. If you want to use them you have to pay licensing fees. Too bad it's not usually a case of "want to use" but instead "must use." I'm not sure if ICD codes are copyrighted.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_Procedural_Terminology#...