Yesterday the US Senate passed a bill, HR 4302, which delays the implementation of ICD-10 for at least a year. The 64 to 35 Senate vote came on the heels of the US House of Representatives’ passage last Thursday to push the implementation date back to at least October 1, 2015. The bill is now scheduled to be sent to President Obama for final signature, making it a law.
Word of this additional year-long extension caught many by surprise, including CMS, who has continually stated that the implementation would not be delayed, and would proceed as scheduled on October 1 of this year. However, a large and powerful physician lobby pressed to have a small paragraph, including the delay of ICD-10, embedded in a larger bill which retracted a nearly 24% cut in Medicare reimbursement to physicians. Had HR 4302 not passed, this Medicare cut would have begun today, April 1, 2014.
Many physicians and physician groups voiced fears that the implementation of ICD-10 would cause an undue burden on their practice. They voiced concern that they would have a more difficult time coding and getting paid by using the more specific ICD-10 code set, which includes up to 69,000 diagnosis codes and nearly 72,000 procedure codes (up from just over 14,000 diagnosis codes and nearly 4,000 procedure codes in ICD-9).
The delay brought mixed feelings across the healthcare spectrum. Many individuals who are currently earning their medical coding degree will be out thousands of dollars. These future coders are strictly learning ICD-10 coding, as ICD-9 was scheduled to be retired in October of this year. Hospitals, home health agencies, and other healthcare settings who had embraced the change and were in various stages of implementation including testing billing capabilities will also lose thousands of dollars because of this delay. As a whole, medical coders were opposed to this delay, stating that the change to ICD-10 is long overdue. ICD-10 implementation has been in the works since the 1990’s and has already seen multiple delays since it was officially released by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1990. The United States is the last industrialized nation to embrace the code set, and many nations are already talking of upgrading to ICD-11.
Home care ‘people’ know the only consistency in home health is change. We will adapt and succeed regardless of these and other changes scheduled to happen over the next several years. At Axxess, we will continue to closely monitor for upcoming government changes, including clarification on what will happen to Case-Mix updates, updates to the ICD-9-CM code set, and implementation of OASIS C1. We will continue to adapt, innovate, and educate our many clients as more information is made known by CMS, ensuring that you have the tools you need for continued success for your agency and your patients.
Please watch our website, www.axxess.com and www.axxess.com/icd-10, as well as in-dashboard messages for announcements as they happen.
