WHO WAS BEHIND ICD-10 DELAY?
All indicators point to House Speaker John Boehner’s office as the source of statutory language that delayed the move to the complex ICD-10 coding system for at least a year, but the speaker’s office won’t confirm that, even two months after the fact, Pro eHealth’s David Pittman reports.
It’s still unknown just who slipped a line into a largely unrelated Medicare bill in March that forestalled the switch. The next-generation medical coding system found itself at the unlikely center of Washington politics this spring.
The move to ICD-10 –short for International Classification of Diseases, version 10, will expand the number of procedure codes from 13,000 to 85,000.
Diagnosis codes increase from 14,000 to 69,000, creating a massive headache for providers.
For context: Under ICD9, a broken lower leg is a broken lower leg. The new system will require separate codes depending on whether it’s a fracture of the patella, fibula or tibia, or if the break is in the upper end of the tibia, or its shaft, or its lower end.
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Originally published on: Politico
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“Diagnosis codes increase from 14,000 to 69,000, creating a massive headache for providers.
For context: Under ICD9, a broken lower leg is a broken lower leg. The new system will require separate codes depending on whether it’s a fracture of the patella, fibula or tibia, or if the break is in the upper end of the tibia, or its shaft, or its lower end.”
Really? Seriously? Oh, come on!
Hospital Providers were already prepared, given that the deadline, at the time of the vote, was only six months away. They had spent millions upgrading systems and training coders for the eventuality.
Payers had also performed upgrades so that they could send and receive vital code-based information in the mandated format.
That leaves physician providers, who were unwilling to spend the money to educate office staff to keep up with the change, or maybe…too parsimonious to do so. It leaves medical device firms who don’t want the data on product failure in the hands of anyone but their own ‘research committees’…and it leaves big pharmaceutical companies, afraid of the increased data gathering capability of coders to attribute complications, side effects and adverse events to some of the drugs possibly caused them.
If left the AMA with their cash cow, CPT, who are afraid of the flexibility and expandability of the PCS code system.
Who’s behind the delay? Follow the money. Boehner was just a willing tool.
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