If you break your leg skiing, when you go to have it set, your doctor will send a code – from the ICD-9 set – to your carrier that indicates what happened and how it was treated so he or she can receive payment.

Today, those codes are fairly specific; whichever one your doctor submits will indicate whether it's an open or closed fracture, which bone you broke and about where the fracture is on the bone.

But once the new code set is implemented for the health care system, the level of specificity for each code will become much more granular. The new international diagnostic coding set, ICD-10, would indicate not only which part of the bone is fractured, but also on which side of the body the bone is, whether you're being treated for the initial encounter or a subsequent encounter with routine or delayed healing, whether the fracture is displaced or non-displaced, and the mechanism of the injury, degree of the bone injury and the extent of soft tissue damage.