The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) may be open to conducting ICD-10 end-to-end testing with physician offices after recent blunders with its Healthcare.gov site, according to a stakeholder who attended a recent meeting with the agency on the topic.
CMS had previously said it wouldn’t do such testing for the new bill-coding system, saying it was confident its current testing was sufficient.
“They were at least willing to revisit the issue of testing,” Robert Tennant, senior policy adviser at the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), told MedPage Today.
MGMA and others as recently as this summer publicly called for testing with physician practices to ensure a smooth transition. “This action would decrease the potential of a catastrophic backlog of Medicare claims following the Oct. 1, 2014, compliance date,” MGMA President Susan Turney, MD, wrote in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
CMS’ confidence in that transition has been challenged recently as the agency has openly admitted it didn’t properly test Healthcare.gov — the Web portal for consumers to access the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces — in the weeks and months leading up to its Oct. 1 launch.
But CMS signaled at an ICD-10 stakeholder collaboration meeting on Tuesday that the agency may be re-examining its ICD-10-testing policies, Tennant said.
“They understand that there’s been a lot of concern in the industry on their testing,” he added. “You don’t test something, and you run the risk. That’s absolutely the message we’re trying to send.”
CMS didn’t respond to a question from MedPage Today about how or if it is re-examining ICD-10 testing in light of the last month’s events. The agency has previously said it was focused on internal testing.
Bonnie Cassidy, senior director of health information management innovation at Burlington, Mass., consultant Nuance, said HHS and CMS have been sent a clear message that full testing prior to rollout is needed.
“They have time to change course and providers would be agreeable to that,” Cassidy said in a telephone interview with MedPage Today.
Physicians have bemoaned the oncoming ICD-10 coding system — short for International Classification of Diseases, version 10 — because of the new system’s tremendous increase in complexity compared with the current ICD-9.
ICD-10 requires much greater detail on location of ailments, cause and type, and complications or manifestations compared with ICD-9. For example, diabetes will have many separate codes that each incorporate different complications. And asthma is listed as “mild,” “mild intermittent,” “mild persistent,” “moderate persistent,” or “severe.”
