Home Health ICD-9/ICD-10 Alert

Say goodbye to ICD-9 in 2013.

If you've been wondering how you can stay up-to-date on the annual changes to the ICD-9 code set while simultaneously preparing for the 2013 transition to ICD-10, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has good news for you.

The ICD-9-CM Coordination & Maintenance (C&M) Committee has decided to implement a partial freeze for both ICD-9-CM codes and ICD-10-CM codes prior to the switch. CMS received "considerable interest ... in dramatically reducing the number of annual updates to both coding systems" as ICD-10 implementation ramps up.

Goal: Reducing the volume of code updates should give "vendors, providers, system maintainers, payers, and educators a better opportunity to prepare for the implementation of ICD-10," the committee explained.

"While the healthcare industry is currently used to handling annual code set modifications, preparation for a transition to an entirely new code set is a much larger and more complex endeavor; incorporating additional code set modifications during the final stages of ICD-10-CM/PCS implementation preparation only adds further cost and complexity," the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) said in an opinion supporting the freeze.

The partial freeze will be implemented as follows:

The ICD-9 Coordination & Maintenance Committee will continue to meet twice a year during the freeze. And the public will have the opportunity to comment on whether new diagnosis and procedure codes should be created based on the need to capture new technologies or diseases.

Any code requests that do not meet the criteria for inclusion during the freeze will be considered for implementation in ICD-10 once the partial freeze is ended -- on or after October 1, 2014.

Looking forward: There will likely be fewer large annual updates once we transition to ICD-10-CM for two reasons, says Lisa Selman-Holman, JD, BSN, RN, HCS-D, COS-C, consultant and principal of Selman-Holman & Associates and CoDR -- Coding Done Right in Denton, Texas. First, because ICD-10-CM is already so complete, and second because ICD-10-CM is owned by the World Health Organization and it has to approve any changes to the code set.