DrChrono Blog

Work on ICD-10 began in 1983 and was completed in 1992. The U.S. is now mandating everyone in healthcare moves over October 1, 2014,  22 years later.

ICD-10 has been pushed back over and over again within the U.S. The U.S. is behind in moving to ICD-10 as ~25 countries have moved over for reimbursement and resource allocation. The U.S. government is pushing everyone in healthcare to ICD-10 compliance by October 1, 2014. 3 trillion dollars are impacted by ICD-10 moving over from ICD-9. Of the GDP, healthcare is 20% of the US economy, so the move will effect everyone, even patients.

It somewhat sounds like what happened in the year 2000, when everyone was investing millions of dollars and after all was said and done everything was OK. This might be the Y2K of healthcare, there will be no phase in, there is a hard switching date.

There are some great tools for the transition:

• ICD-9 to ICD-10 Mapping
• Billing Code Search for ICD-9

Looking at the differences between at high level:

  <ul>
    <li>
      3-5 characters in length
    </li>
    <li>
      ~13,000 codes
    </li>
  </ul>
</td>

<td>
  <b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">ICD-10</span> </b></p> 
  
  <ul>
    <li>
      3-7 characters in length
    </li>
    <li>
      ~68,000 codes
    </li>
  </ul>
</td>

The AMA also has great document on explaining the differences between ICD-9 and ICD-10.

ICD-10 requires much greater detail on ailments, cause, type, complications, compared with ICD-9. For example, diabetes will have many separate codes that each incorporate different complications. And asthma is listed as “mild,” “mild intermittent,” “mild persistent,” “moderate persistent,” or “severe.”

Another interesting thing that might come out of this all is RAC audits, will RAC audits increase? Only time will tell.

MGMA Surveys

• June 2013 Survey 4.7% of practices had made progress in preparing for ICD-10
• Jan 2014 Survey 10 physician practices (9.4%) out of 570 medical groups ready

Nearly 65% of clinical documentation doesn’t contain enough information for coders to use for billing under ICD-10 according to the AMA.

Average cost $13,000 per physician to upgrade to ICD-10 codes, we are upgrading all of our users free and paying at no additional cost.

It is critical for our team, other software vendor, clearinghouses, and health plans to all be on the same page getting everyone ready for ICD-10. The goal of our team is to make the trasition as easy as possible, we will be rolling out an alternate view so users of drchrono can switch between what everyone already knows within drchrono and what is to come, so physicians can use ICD-10 codes.

We recently spoke about how drchrono is moving from ICD-9 to ICD-10 on Information Management DM Radio show.

The show was super interesting and a heated debate about how ICD-10 will effect everyone in the medical industry at large. Eric Kavanagh was moderating the talk.

There is a conversion tool we are releasing, an iPad app to convert  ICD-9 codes to ICD-10 codes, here is what it looks like, it is coming soon!

 Want to learn more? Listen to this radio talk about ICD-10