The American Medical Association believes that a minimum of a two-year delay is necessary to conduct a cost-benefit analysis on physician practices and evaluate whether an alternative code set is more appropriate.

Health Data Management brought this latest news to our attention in their article, “AMA: Postpone ICD-10 At Least Two Years.” They reference that other countries have implemented a modified version of ICD-10 with substantial government support.

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, especially with the impending ICD-10 transition. 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 thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.