AMA advises against ICD-9 to ICD-11 conversion

With the World Health Organization May 2015 release of ICD-11 set to take place eight months after the U.S. compliance date for ICD-10, the question arose whether moving from ICD-9 to ICD-11 makes sense. American Medical Association (AMA) Board of Trustees weighed in on the matter in a recent report, strongly recommending against skipping ICD-10.  

The AMA report stressed its concerns about the “significant burden” of implementing ICD-10, and its continued role to advocate on behalf of those struggling to make headway on the upcoming requirement.

However, “given the even greater complexities and uncertainties with moving directly from ICD-9 to ICD-11, the Board of Trustees believes skipping ICD-10 and moving directly to ICD-11 is fraught with its own pitfalls and therefore, based on current information available, is not recommended,” according to the report.

The AMA report listed out the advantages and disadvantages of moving from ICD-9 to ICD-10.

While it noted that waiting for ICD-11 could allow providers to shift their resources to EHR implementation and health information exchange infrastructure development, and would put physicians through one, instead of two, conversation periods, it reported a number of disadvantages. These include:

• The continued use of ICD-9, which contains outdated codes and limits the ability to use diagnosis codes to advance the understanding of diseases and treatments, identify quality care, drive population health and develop new payment delivery models
• The industry will lose out on improvements in the ICD-10 codes, including greater specificity of codes and updated terminology
• Skipping ICD-10 will impede industry’s ability to build on their knowledge and experience of ICD-10, upon which ICD-11 will be built
• Skipping to ICD-11 takes away educational opportunities for physicians, leaving them unprepared, and could cause significant cash flow disruptions
• Skipping ICD-10 would delay one expected benefit of implementing ICD-10, which is reducing payers’ reliance on requesting additional information, known as “attachments"

“The AMA will continue to advocate for physicians on this issue and monitor the situation as new information becomes available,” the report added.