The American Medical Association (AMA) has finally shifted from fighting ICD-10 implementation to efforts to help physicians be ready in time for the Oct. 1 deadline.

The switch came as a result of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) agreeing not to deny claims with coding errors for the first year of ICD-10, cutting quality reporting requirements, taking steps to reduce payment disruption and setting up a communications center to triage coding issues.

AMA now wants to make sure providers are ready for ICD-10 and will work with CMS to provide education through webinars, on-site training, educational articles and national provider calls to help physicians and other healthcare providers learn about the updated codes and prepare for the transition.

Providers seem to be well on the way to preparing for the change in codesets: CMS announced this week that it accepted 90 percent of submitted claims during the latest and third ICD-10 end-to-end testing week last month.

The testing occurred from June 1 through June 5 during which 1,238 voluntary participants submitted more than 13,000 claims.

Of the rejected claims, CMS found the reasons for rejections were unrelated to ICD-10. For example, rejected claims errors include invalid national provider identifier, invalid beneficiary number, invalid or missing ZIP code or invalid Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System code.

Could we really have reached a point in which rigorous debate about ICD-10 implementation has come to an end?

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor