ICD-10 is no longer a foreign term to anyone in healthcare and now technology. It is a comprehensive, internationally used list designed to code for diseases and other healthcare conditions. It is scheduled to be implemented in two years on October 1, 2014. This switch to ICD-10 requires software updates and staff training. These are challenges for most and require some help.
We just reported yesterday on the American Medical Association's (AMA) continued battle to stop the ICD-10 coding classification transition that is due to be finished in October 2014. Today, we learn about the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) responses to their protests.
Even with the deadline coming faster and faster, the American Medical Association continues their resistance to the ICD-10 coding classification transition.
We have talked about the various concerns of the impending ICD-10 conversion for quite some time now. Implementing the new coding classification system will have impact on many areas of healthcare, but let us not forget the financial markets and how this could change investors’ views of healthcare organizations.
It is now 2013 and that means healthcare providers will be ramping up their efforts to prepare for the ICD-10 coding classification transition scheduled for October 1, 2014. Providers are scrambling to be prepared in all ways.
As October 1, 2014 approaches, many are working hard preparing for the ICD-9 to ICD-10 coding classification transition. To not be ready would put HIPAA-covered healthcare organizations in a dire position – one without operating capital. Noncompliance would prohibit them from billing for services rendered.
Every year new challenges present themselves. Sometimes it is in technology, sometimes it is in process, and sometimes it is all of the above. This year and most likely next year, the biggest challenge healthcare organizations are facing involves the ICD-10 coding classification transition. With the deadline postponed to October 2014, that gives an extra year to worry, and plan.
Many articles have been written here and other places about the ICD-10 coding classification transition and the fast approaching deadline of October 2014. Thorough and complex information has been provided to healthcare organizations to help them prepare for this huge change.
Medical professionals are always concerned about healthcare fraud and with the impending ICD-10 transition, this concerns increases. Detection relies on complex algorithms to detect outliers in claims data, but the concern is that ICD-10 may challenge these algorithms and render them less than efficient.
With the ICD-10 conversion less than two years away, there are pressing issues for providers looking to implement the new coding classification system. At the top of the "to-do" list is education and training for the staff who will be directly involved in using the new ICD-10 codes.