By Andrew Pollack, New York Times, Dec. 29, 2013

Know someone who drowned from jumping off burning water skis? Well, there’s a new medical billing code for that.  Been injured in a spacecraft? There’s a new code for that, too. Roughed up by an Orca whale? It’s on the list.

Starting next year, a transformation is coming to the arcane world of medical billing. Overnight, virtually the entire health care system — Medicare, Medicaid, private insurers, hospitals, doctors and various middlemen — will switch to a new set of computerized codes used for determining what ailments patients have and how much they and their insurers should pay for a specific treatment.

The changes are unrelated to the Obama administration’s the new health care law. But given the lurching start of the federal health insurance website, HealthCare.gov, some doctors and health care information technology specialists fear major disruptions to health care delivery if the new coding system — also heavily computer-reliant — isn’t put in place properly [....]