AHIMA conference concludes without new ICD-10 implementation date

Despite high hopes that Denise Buenning, acting deputy director for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Office of E-Health Standards and Services, would use her appearance at the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) conference in Washington, D.C., as a platform for revealing the new ICD-10 implementation date, the conference ended Wednesday with no further information from CMS on when the actual switch would happen.

In her presentation, Buenning said that CMS would have been ready to switch to ICD-10 coding on October 1 of this year, and that she was just as surprised as everyone else that Congress included a provision in its sustainable growth rate (SGR) one-year fix to also prohibit CMS from implementing ICD-10 coding before October 1, 2015. It is up to CMS, and specifically Buenning’s office, to say if October 1, 2015, is the new deadline, or if it is some other date after that point in time.

Buenning walked attendees through the challenges her office has faced in setting a new deadline, and promised that a new transition date would be announced very soon. She urged attendees to do their part in ensuring no further legislation is passed to the delay the transition.

“Work through your national associations. There’s strength in numbers. These folks work with the Hill on the daily basis and know what can be done,” she said according to the Journal of AHIMA.

The American Medical Association supported a delay in ICD-10 implementation, but most health IT groups, device manufacturers, insurers and hospitals did not. The American Hospital Association (AHA), AHIMA, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), BlueCross BlueShield Association, the Medical Device Manufacturers Association (MDMA), 3M Health Information Systems, Roche Diagnostics Corporation, Siemens Health Services, WellPoint and many more have written either as a coalition or individually to CMS urging no further delays and a prompt announcement of October 1, 2015, as the new transition deadline.

In a question and answer session following her remarks, Buenning also warned providers eager to begin using ICD-10 to not try submitting ICD-10 coded claims ahead of the official transition.

“If it’s not an adopted code set, it’s not allowed,” Buenning said according to the Journal of AHIMA.