Countdown to ICD-10 Winds Down as October 1 Start Date Approaches

by Kimberly J. Retzlaff •

“There seems to be such a giant number of codes in ICD-10, but if the otolaryngology community realizes the need is to focus on diagnoses encountered most often and know those codes, we probably will do just fine, or at least make it through the transition and get up on the learning curve,” Dr. Waguespack said. “Hopefully, this will turn out to be like Y2K, where it looked like there was the potential for impending doom and end of civilization as we know it, but it turned out to not be anything of the sort for most of us.”

Kimberly J. Retzlaff is a medical journalist based in Denver.

Adapted with the permission of The American College of Rheumatology from an article in the July 2015 issue of The Rheumatologist.

Resources

There are numerous resources online and in person that physicians and their staff can use to prepare for switching to the ICD-10 code set.

ICD-10 Timeline

Jan. 15, 2009—ICD-10 announced; “go live” slated for October 2013.
Aug. 27, 2012—HHS announced a one-year delay of ICD-10 implementation, pushing the date to Oct. 1, 2014.
Feb. 19, 2014—The federal government agreed to conduct end- to-end testing on ICD-10 for select providers.
March 3–7, 2014—Testing week.
Apr. 1, 2014—Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014 (Pub. L. No. 113-93) delayed go live until October 2015.
Jan. 26–30, 2015—CMS conducted the first of three rounds of end-to-end testing.
April 27–May 1, 2015—CMS conducted the second of three rounds of end-to-end testing.
July 6, 2015—CMS/AMA jointly announced a 12-month implementation period.
July 20–24, 2015—CMS scheduled the third of three rounds of end-to-end testing.
July 24, 2015—CMS released a list of “clarifying questions and answers” to further explain ICD-10.
Oct. 1, 2015—Go live.