ED Coding and Reimbursement Alert

CMS is trying to ease the transition with education and helpful resources. A website http://www.roadto10.org/ was created for physician practices and includes primers for clinical documentation, including physician perspectives, webcasts and interactive medical cases to help understand clinical scenarios including abdominal pain, fractures, or being hit by a car. It also contains FAQs and a template library that includes checklists to access the ICD-10 readiness of your software vendor, billing and coding company, and payers to help with implementation.

The ICD-10 Ombudsman will be in place by October 1^st as part of a communication and collaboration center for monitoring ICD-10 in an effort to quickly identify and provide solutions during the transition to ICD-10. The Ombudsman’s role is to triage and answer questions from providers about the submission of claims by working closely with CMS regional offices. Instructions on how to submit issues to the Ombudsman have not yet been released, says Michael A. Granovsky, MD, FACEP, CPC, President of LogixHealth a national ED coding and billing company.