ICD-10 Proponents Warn of Harmful Implications of Another Delay

AHIMA officials have said that another delay in ICD-10 will cost the industry money and wasted time implementing the new code set. Groups opposing ICD-10 have said that the implementation, with its large increase in codes and need to adapt healthcare systems, causes an unnecessary burden on providers.

CMS estimates that a one year delay could cost between $1 billion to $6.6 billion, according a statement from AHIMA officials. ”This is approximately 10-30 percent of what has already been invested by providers, payers, vendors and academic programs in your district,” AHIMA wrote in a statement, which it encouraged its members to use when contacting Congressional representatives. ”Without ICD-10, the return on investment in EHRs and health data exchange will be greatly diminished…  Let Senate Majority Leader Reid and Chairman [Ron] Wyden know that a delay in ICD-10 will substantially increase total implementation costs in your district.”

In a letter to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner, members of the Coalition for ICD-10 said that CMS and other government officials should move forward with the current ICD-10 deadline of October 1, 2014. Coalition representatives include the American Hospital Association (AHA), the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), BlueCross BlueShield Association, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), and vendors like 3M Health Information Systems and Siemens Health Services.

“Although many of the signatories to this letter were at odds over the timing of implementation when the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) and HHS embraced ICD-10—which has already been adopted outside the U.S. worldwide—we are now in agreement that any further delay or deviation from the October 1, 2014 compliance date would be disruptive and costly for health care delivery innovation, payment reform, public health, and health care spending,” the letter reads. “By allowing for greater coding accuracy and specificity, ICD-10 is key to collecting the information needed to implement health care delivery innovations such as patient-centered medical homes and value-based purchasing,” the letter stated.

“Moreover, any further delays in adoption of ICD-10 in the U.S. will make it difficult to track new and emerging public health threats. The transition to ICD-10 is time sensitive because of the urgent need to keep up with tracking, identifying, and analyzing new medical services and treatments available to patients,” the letter continued. “Continued reliance on the increasingly outdated and insufficient ICD-9 coding system is not an option when considering the risk to public health.”

The impact of another delay in ICD-10 would be far reaching across the healthcare industry, AHIMA officials said. Many healthcare education programs have been teaching ICD-10 exclusively to students in preparation for the October implementation, while healthcare organizations have invested time and money into preparing staff and systems for the switch.

Groups opposing ICD-10 have said that the implementation, with its large increase in codes and need to adapt healthcare systems, causes an unnecessary burden on providers.

The call for a delay likely came as a surprise to CMS. On February 27, Tavenner announced at the Health Information and Management Systems Society Annual Conference that ICD-10 would not be delayed any further, stating “we have already delayed the adoption standard, a standard the rest of the world has adopted many years ago, and we have delayed it several times, most recently last year. There will be no change in the deadline for ICD-10.”

AHIMA Calls on Members to Request Removal of Delay Provision

AHIMA has put out a call to members and other stakeholders to contact their senators and ask them to take the ICD-10 provision out of the Senate’s version of the SGR bill.

When contacting congressional members, AHIMA has instructed callers to state that their senators should:

• Oppose the specific language in the SGR patch legislation
• Reach out to the Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to remove the ICD-10 language from the bill

CMS estimates that a one year delay could cost between $1 billion to $6.6 billion, according a statement from AHIMA officials. ”This is approximately 10-30 percent of what has already been invested by providers, payers, vendors and academic programs in your district,” AHIMA wrote in a statement, which it encouraged its members to use when contacting Congressional representatives. ”Without ICD-10, the return on investment in EHRs and health data exchange will be greatly diminished…  Let Senate Majority Leader Reid and Chairman [Ron] Wyden know that a delay in ICD-10 will substantially increase total implementation costs in your district.”

Contacting Your Congressional Representatives

For more information on contacting your senators in Congress, visit AHIMA’s Advocacy and Public Policy representative look-up site at http://capwiz.com/ahima/dbq/officials/.