CMS: March ICD-10 testing week very successful

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS’) ICD-10 testing week conducted in March proved successful, with the agency accepting 89 percent of the test claims and some regions reporting acceptance rates as high as 99 percent.

That week, 2,600 participating providers, suppliers, billing companies and clearinghouses submitted 127,000 claims with ICD-10 codes to the Medicare fee-for-service claims systems, wrote Niall Brennan, acting director within CMS’ Offices of Enterprise Management, in a blog post. This group represented about five percent of all submitters.

In all, clearinghouses were the largest group of testers, submitting about 50 percent of all test claims. Others included large and small physician practices, small and large hospitals, labs, ambulatory surgical centers, dialysis facilities, home health providers and ambulance providers.

“This testing week allowed an opportunity for testers and CMS alike to learn valuable lessons about ICD-10 claims processing,” he wrote. Testers often included errors in their claims on purpose to ensure the claim would be rejected, a process often referred to as negative testing. To be processed correctly, all claims must have a valid diagnosis code that matches the date of service and a valid national provider identifier. The ICD-10 claims also had to have an ICD-10 companion qualifier code and the claims using ICD-9 had to use the ICD-9 qualifier code, he wrote.

The Department of Health & Human Services plans to release an interim final rule in the “near future” that would require the use of ICD-10 beginning Oct. 1, 2015, according to Brennan.