I think it's safe to call it a year and look back the top ICD-10 stories of 2013. While the past year was relatively tame, at least in regard to the mad scramble some expect leading up to October 1, 2014, there were some significant developments.
National Pilot Program takes off
Several large healthcare providers joined together in 2013 and tested their ability to deliver ICD-10 coded medical claims.
As expected, there were a lot of mistakes, some of them simple. For example, medical coders confused letters and numbers. There also were a few too many claims scanned upside down. Many of the ICD-10 codes were incorrect. And it took twice as long to assign ICD-10 codes as ICD-9 codes.
On one hand, it didn't seem to bode well for a smooth ICD-10 transition. On the other, this test took place more than a year from the ICD-10 implementation deadline. Participating medical coders didn't have a lot of experience or practice.
Now we know that a successful transition to ICD-10 will mean more than looking up new diagnoses and procedure codes. But these are the simple mistakes that shouldn't happen again, and we should be happy this was figured out when it was.
Oct. 1, 2013
The deadline to use ICD-10 codes should have been crossed about 3 months ago. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) delayed it a year.
This made 2013 a less stressful year for hospital and physician practice leaders. But maybe there should have been more stress because surveys aren't finding much reason to be optimistic about ICD-10 implementation being accomplished within the next nine months.
HealthCare.gov
This actually did happen on Oct. 1. The federal government launched the website that didn't deliver on its promise of making health insurance easy to purchase. Add that to the controversy of healthcare payers canceling some of their policies. That adds up to a federal government that doesn't look like it knows what its doing when it comes to healthcare mandates.
And that's why the Affordable Care Act matters when we look at ICD-10 implementation. CMS' credibility has taken a hit. It doesn't seem plausible when they assure the healthcare industry that everything will be fine.
I am surprised that the American Medical Association (AMA) hasn't created anti-ICD-10 literature that identifies CMS as "the agency that brought you HealthCare.gov."
This development that ostensibly has nothing to do with ICD-10 implementation may be the most important thing to happen in the ICD-10 debate.