Dive Brief:
- The CDC and CMS will be adding 1,900 diagnostic codes and 3,651 hospital inpatient procedure codes to ICD-10 for fiscal year 2017.
- There was a freeze on updates to the codes prior to the October 1, 2015 implementation date, according to the American Hospital Association (AHA).
- CMS' website has a list of the new procedural codes and the new diagnosis codes will be released next month.
Dive Insight:
ICD-10 was met with a fair amount of controversy in light of the 68,000 new codes added from ICD-9, which had only 13,000 billing codes, as previously reported by Healthcare Dive. After many delays, ICD-10 was implemented last October with resources to assist physicians in figuring it all out from the AMA and CMS. While it's doubtful the new additional 5,000 will bring any applause, the transition was strikingly quiet.
Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt last month shared four main takeaways from the implementation experience:
- Be customer focused;
- Be highly collaborative;
- Be responsible and accountable; and
- Be driven by metrics.
He stopped slightly short of calling the implementation a knock out of the park. However, among its top achievements during the implementation, CMS noted when it received about 1,000 inquiries during the first month, it met its goal of responding to all of them within three business days. "We will never achieve perfection, but we will be visible and hold ourselves accountable for solving problems," Slavitt wrote.