The Senate has voted to approve a bill that will delay the implementation of ICD-10-CM/PCS by at least one year. The bill now moves to President Obama, who is expected to sign it into law. The bill was passed at the end of March
The bill, H.R. 4302, Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014, mainly creates a temporary “fix” to the Medicare sustainable growth rate (SGR). A seven-line section of the bill states that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cannot adopt the ICD–10 code set as the standard until at least October 1, 2015.
The delay of ICD-10 impacts much more than just coded medical bills, but also quality, population health, and other programs that expected to start using ICD-10 codes in October. The extent of the logistical challenges and costs associated with “dialing back” to ICD-9-CM are not yet fully understood, AHIMA officials said, but are expected to be extensive.
CMS has estimated that another one-year delay of ICD-10 would likely cost the industry an additional $1 billion to $6.6 billion on top of the costs already incurred from the previous one-year delay. This does not include the lost opportunity costs of failing to move to a more effective code set, AHIMA said.
Many coding education programs had switched to teaching only ICD-10 codes to students, hospitals and physician offices had begun moving into the final stages of costly and comprehensive transitions to the new code set—even the CMS and NCHS committee responsible for officially updating the current code set changed the group’s name to the ICD-10-CM/PCS Coordination and Maintenance Committee.
“It is truly unfortunate that Congress chose to embed language about delaying ICD-10 into legislation intended to address the need for an SGR fix in their effort to temporarily address the long outstanding and critically important physician payment issues.”
SNVBill had been preparing to switch to the ICD-10 code set on October 1, 2014. We will keep you updated.
Source:
http://journal.ahima.org/2014/03/31/senate-votes-on-icd-10-delay-bill/