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 health

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. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_Procedural_Terminology#Copyright http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_Procedural_Terminology#...