...that's in essence what the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is all about.

You may have been hearing the buzz about transitioning the codes that hospitals and physicians use to bill, from "ICD-9" to "ICD-10"...whoa, did they think of everything...

Many moons ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed a system for coding and billing. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), uses the system to determine payments.

You think ICD-9 had lots of codes (14,000 diagnostic and 3,000 procedural), well ICD-10 has tons of more detail that describes illnesses, injuries, and procedures. Yep, the new system has 68,000 diagnostic and 87,000 procedural codes-yikes!

Predictors estimate that there will be $1.64 billion spent nation wide for training, software upgrades, and lost productivity while folks ramp up to being experts.

At this point, some have suggested just not implementing this in October of 2014 and just waiting a little longer and jumping to ICD-11!...Why not? Oh well, never a dull moment in healthcare regulations.