ICD-9 has been the system used for almost 40 years. Coming in October 2013, things will change. The new ICD-10 coding classification system will be in effect with five times the amount of medical codes for healthcare providers to use and diagnosis codes with more digits. Before the billing systems can accommodate the expanded field length for diagnoses, a new format system for electronic billing needs to take place first. This is scheduled to happen in just a few days on January 1, 2012.
This topic was brought to our attention by EHR Bloggers in their post, “Next Step in ICD-10 Conversation Coming January 1.”
Medical coding requires specialized expertise and systems tailored to the regulatory requirements in which health care providers, hospitals, and doctors deliver their services. Training is very important. That is why Access Innovations, Inc. provides training to a client’s staff and then offers quality assurance and validation services that can:
- Minimize the risk of a coding error
- Identify inappropriate or inadvertently applied tags
- Display a “map” of coding distributions to allow management to get a bird’s-eye view of the coding assignment flow.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
