Pathology/Lab Coding Alert

Remember that ICD-10 goes into effect Oct. 1 this year for Medicare, meaning that you’ll need to be ready to upgrade roughly 14,000 diagnosis codes to 68,000. But Medicaid, Worker’s Comp and other payers aren’t compelled to abide by that date, so you might be straddling two coding systems for a time.

The fact that insurers can choose which diagnosis code system to use is an “unfair payer advantage,” says Yuval Lirov, PhD, CEO of Vericle, a healthcare practice management software platform. “You have flexible deadlines for payers and a hard deadline for providers, and the providers must be able to handle both ICD-9 and ICD-10 simultaneously.”