"Be serious about the date."
That's the advice of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service Acting Administrator Kerry Weems, when asked Tuesday about how CMS could help drive the conversion of healthcare diagnostic and billing codes from ICD-9 to ICD-10 code sets.
That issue came up often as members of the American Health Information Management Association, in Seattle for the organization's 80th annual convention, discussed changing healthcare diagnostic and billing codes. It's a proposed sweeping change that has many who work in the field jittery.
It means high costs as hospitals, physicians, payers and others adapt or replace their software for the new code. It also means learning to deal not only with extra alpha-numeric digits, but also with more than 155,000 codes, compared to the 17,000 in ICD-9.
The date in CMS' proposed rule is Oct. 1, 2011, but a deadline for conversion will not be set until CMS reviews comments that are flowing in from all sectors of the industry. And the government has been known to be wishy-washy on the deadline.
Comments must be received by 5 p.m. on Oct. 21.
Most stakeholders seem to be in favor of the conversion, Weems said.
"The major part of the discussion is to what the implementation date is," he said. He noted that the upcoming change of leadership in the White House could influence whether the new rules take effect as planned or are delayed, as it's customary for an incoming administration to freeze all pending rules.
Weems said he plans to put forth final rules for ICD-10 this year. He said CMS first needs to read and address the comments.
The government has delayed deadlines for conversion to the ICD-10 code that other countries already employ. But the country can't delay any longer, even in these tough economic times, said Sandy Fuller, chief operating officer of AHIMA.
"The problem, I think we face, is it just costs more," Fuller said. "There is a cost to delay."
Hospitals and physician practices will buy new systems, enter more data and create workarounds, she said.
There are plenty of technology companies ready to help hospitals, physician practices and payers convert to the ICD-10 codes. Ingenix, which is owned by United HealthGroup, is among them.
Ingenix executives say it's time to bite the bullet.
"The longer you wait to implement it, the more it's going to cost," said Cheryl D'Amato, director of health information management for Ingenix. Her colleague Laurine Johnson says adoption of ICD-10 is more difficult in the United States because, unlike Canada and Europe, coding is tied to reimbursement.
How are you preparing for conversion to ICD-10 codes? Send your comments to Editor Bernie Monegain at bernie.monegain@medtechpublishing.com.