General Surgery Coding Alert

Avoid procrastination trap.

You won’t have to meet the Oct. 1, 2014 implementation deadline for ICD-10 after all.

That’s because, as part of the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014, a single sentence change everything: “The Secretary of Health and Human Services may not, prior to October 1, 2015, adopt ICD–10 code sets as the standard for code sets.” 

What this means for your general surgery group: You have at least one more year to get ready to implement ICD-10. Use it well.

Check Out Stakeholder Response

You may be dancing in the streets, but not everyone is happy about the delay. 

“AHIMA officials have said that another delay in ICD-10 will cost the industry money and wasted time implementing the new code set,” the American Health Information Management Association said in a statement responding to the bill before it passed.

CMS seconds that cost analysis, stating that this one-year ICD-10 implementation delay will likely cost the industry an additional $1 to $6.6 billion. That’s on top of the costs already incurred from the previous one-year delay. Recall that CMS previously pushed back the original implementation deadline from Oct. 1, 2013 to Oct. 1, 2014.

But this recent legislative call for a delay likely came as a surprise to CMS. As recently as a month prior to the bill, CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner had stated, “we have already delayed the adoption standard, a standard the rest of the world has adopted many years ago, and we have delayed it several times, most recently last year. There will be no change in the deadline for ICD-10.”

Avoid the ‘We Don’t Need to Keep Preparing’ Pitfall

The delay doesn’t mean your ICD-10 preparation can cease — it might even make your job harder. While the “transition to ICD-10 remains inevitable and time-sensitive… stakeholders … are forced to navigate the challenge of continuing to prepare for ICD-10 while still using ICD-9,” noted AHIMA CEO Lynne Thomas Gordon, MBA, RHIA, CAE, FACHE, FAHIMA in a press release responding to the law. 

While some stakeholders feel this new law and resulting ICD-10 implementation delay is not good for healthcare practices, there may be a small silver lining. “I think it is a bad thing because it affects our momentum to crossing the finish line,” explains Laureen Jandroep, CPC, CPC-I, CMSCS, CHCI, senior instructor at CodingCertification.org in Oceanville, N.J. “However we can use the extra time to prepare even more thoroughly so we can make the best of it. For those that have made the investment getting ready it is frustrating to see their investment lose traction.”

Despite the delay in implementation, experts warn that you must continue your efforts to prepare for ICD-10 use. “Part of the reason we’re in this situation is that not enough people have prepared, and petitioned for more time,” Jandroep says. “It is not fair to those that did prepare and are ready or were going to be by the 10/1/2014 date. The changes are in the implementation date, not that it is not coming at all, so prepare on!”