When an accident happens, injured people tend to end up in the Emergency Room of the closest hospital. No matter what the nature of the injury is, there is a specific code that needs to be entered on the form that goes to the person’s insurance company. There really is a code for a paintball injury.
According to estimates by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, there are an average of 56 visits every day to Emergency Rooms all across the United States due to an injury that was caused by a BB gun, a pellet gun, or a paintball gun.
In 2008, there were 20,000 claims that involved these types of injuries. The majority of them, 97%, were due to either BB guns or pellet guns. The most frequent injury due to a paintball gun involves a bruise, which can be extremely painful. More than half, 57% of the people who sustain a paintball injury are children.
When a person gets injured, the first thing that they need to figure out is if the injury is severe or serious enough to require a trip to the Emergency Room. If the person goes to the ER, one of the first questions he or she will be asked will be whether or not the person has health insurance coverage.
If the person happens to be fortunate enough to have health insurance, then there will, eventually, be a claim form involved. At some point, some medical professional will need to fill out that claim form in order to tell the insurance company what the person’s injury was, and what treatment he or she received.
The doctor isn’t going to sit down and write a story about what took place in the ER that day. Instead, the doctor, or whatever medical person ends up filling out the insurance form, will use a code. There is a specific standardized diagnostic code that has been assigned to every possible type of injury. The official rule book on this is called the “International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification.”
Did you get injured by a BB gun or pellet gun? That would be listed on your insurance claim as E922.4. What if you accidentally got injured by a paintball gun, and not a BB gun? Then your claim would include the code E922.5 instead.
What if it wasn’t an accident at all? Let’s say that your injury came about as the result of being assaulted by a person who was using an air gun. In that case, E968.6 would be the code for that. It doesn’t end there. The code E985.6 corresponds to “Injury by air gun, undetermined whether accident or on purpose”. Another code, E985.7 means “Injury by paintball gun, undetermined whether on accident or on purpose”.
Image by virginsuicide photography on Flickr