The Department of Health and Human Services announced that medical providers and insurers have until October 1, 2014 to comply with the International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition, NextGov reports.That equates to a one year delay on diagnosis and procedure code compliance.
ICD-10 requires medical professionals to codify 68,000 codes from the current 13,000 codes within ICD-9.
John Pulley wrote that the US medical community is still using ICD-9 and “the rest of the world” is quickly transitioning to ICD-10.
ICD-10 codification is part of the required health plan identified under the Affordable Care Act.
HPID is expected to “save up to $6 billion over 10 years by standardizing identifiers used by health-care providers when billing a health plan for delivery of services.”
In response to the one year delay, the American Medical Association suggested that implementation of the ICD-10 must be pushed back by two years due to the number of codes and other HHS programs.
