T minus 12 months and counting until physicians and hospitals must comply with the federal government's October 1, 2014 deadline to implement the ICD-10 system for classifying diseases. Developed by the World Health Organization, its predecessor ICD-9 has been in place since the late 1970s. It lists no fewer than 13,000 billable codes, which include such exotic diagnoses as "injury from fall while occupying spacecraft" and "exposure to fireball effects of nuclear weapon." The U.S. clinical modification of ICD-10 will include no fewer than 68,000 codes. These changes are emblematic of a plague of complexification sweeping across healthcare.
