Legend has it that there once was a boy who, on his way to school, noticed a small leak in a dike and, knowing he would be late for school, poked his finger in the hole until a passerby later saw him, went to get help, and many others who came to his aid were able to repair the dike and seal the leak. He saved the day with his forethought and self-sacrifice. What does this have to do with health care?
U.S. health plans are just like that little Dutch boy, with the coming onslaught of conversion to ICD-10 coding next year, and the fraud and misrepresentation likely to ensue from that confusing and daunting task (real or fabricated).
We have a little over a year left to seal up that leak.
While we say other countries have been on ICD-10 since 1994, the level of adoption from place to place still varies. To date, the United States has continued to use ICD-9, but that will end by mandate in October of 2014. We’ll be converting from 17,000 disease classifications to over 150,000, with significantly more specificity. But if the rest of the globe is any indicator, it is likely that the U.S. will be accepting data with a blend of ICD-9 and ICD-10 codes for years to come. This will impact providers, billers, health plans, and anyone who analyzes U.S. health care claims data, but each party is essentially left to its own devices to re-map the codes.
