by Cheryl Nash
As everyone has heard by now, ICD10 has been put on hold… again! This time due to some last minute partisan angling by a select few members of the House of Representatives. So the question remains, now what?
First a bit of background. The House voted and passed a bill on 03/27/14 that addressed the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) reductions in the Medicare fee schedule. This bill included a last minute addition postponing the implementation date of ICD10 to 10/01/2015.The bill was then passed up to Senate, who approved the bill on 03/31/14, incidentally the last day of the current extension of SGR. This last minute change was extremely costly to the healthcare industry. It is estimated that the overall expense of the delay will cost an additional 1 to 6 billion dollars, and the SGR wasn’t even fixed, it was just postponed for another year.
So how does this affect your practice?
Most of the Health industry has been preparing for the switch for quite some time now, but perhaps you were a bit behind, maybe panicking a little on how you were going to meet the deadline. Now you can breathe easier and extend your implementation plan. Maybe you bought or are testing out a new EHR. This is a great opportunity to really test the compliance capability of that system. It’s also a great time for your team to get some truly comprehensive training, and be confident in your practices ability to meet the extensive documentation requirements.
Don’t make the mistake of being idle. Start testing your knowledge to select the new codes, become familiar and comfortable with them. Identify which of the codes match up to the codes you already use, and practice choosing both sets for your claims. I’m not saying code all claims this way; most of you certainly don’t have that kind of time! But maybe a couple claims a week, or even a month will go a long way towards making sure your practice will be ready.
Remember, ICD9 is extremely outdated, and will eventually be obsolete. Change will happen, even within the painfully slow wheels of Congress.
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