ICD-10: HHS Officially Delays Compliance Deadline to October 1, 2015; CMS Publishes 2015 ICD-10 Guidelines

In August, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a final rule which delayed the transition to ICD-10 until October 1, 2015, one year away. Prior to the enactment of the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014 (PAMA), the health care industry was preparing to transition to ICD-10 by October 1st of this year. Last week the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) published the official ICD-10 Guidelines for Coding and Reporting.  CMS explains that these guidelines should be used in conjunction with the official version of the ICD-10-CM as published on the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) website. ICD-10 The International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10) is an update to ICD-9, the official system for assigning codes to medical diagnoses. The codes provide an alphabetical index to all disease entries and a classification system for procedures. The U.S. has lagged behind other countries in updating to ICD-10, but the process is by no means a quick fix. The number of procedural and diagnostic codes is estimated to increase from about 17,000 unique codes in ICD-9 to over 140,000 unique codes in ICD-10. A procedure like an angioplasty, for example, will shift from having 1 code to having 854 possible codes, reported MedPage Today. Needless to say, doctors have been wary about the change.  Due to the vast amount of new data in the update, many doctors and other...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs