Home Health & Hospice Week

You don’t get to ignore coding revisions for years.

Medicare has extended its ICD-9 code freeze through Oct. 1, 2015, but that doesn’t mean your diagnosis coding updating will be on hold until then.

Reminder: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has said for Oct. 1, 2014, there will be limited code updates to both the ICD-9 and ICD-10 code sets to capture new technologies and diseases. For Oct. 1, 2015, there will be limited code updates to ICD-10 code sets to capture new technologies and diagnoses, but no updates to ICD-9.

Then, regular updates to ICD-10 begin on Oct. 1, 2016.

“What we do know is that, despite ongoing code freezes, changes have been made in the ICD-10-CM code set including changes to instructions in the tabular list, corrections to the alphabetical index and tweaks to the guidelines themselves,” says coding expert Lisa Selman-Holman of Selman-Hol-man & Associates and CoDR — Coding Done Right in Denton, Texas. “So don’t kid yourself that nothing is new.”

“‘Code freeze’ apparently only means ‘no new codes,’ since any codes for new diseases will likely not impact home health,” Selman-Holman adds.