The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released a final rule on adoption of ICD-10 code sets that pushes the compliance deadline back by two years.
The final rule replaces the ICD-9-CM code sets now used to report health care diagnoses and procedures with greatly expanded ICD-10 code sets, with a compliance date of Oct. 1, 2013. This compliance date is two years later than the Oct. 1, 2011, compliance date initially proposed by HHS, and responds to concerns raised in comments on the proposed rule regarding implementation costs, personnel training, and testing needs.
ICD-9-CM is widely viewed as outdated because of the limited ability to accommodate new procedures and diagnoses within the established hierarchy of the coding system. ICD-9-CM contains only 17,000 codes, and Volume 3, which contains the hospital inpatient procedure codes, has been running out of available space for several years. By contrast, the ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS code sets contain more than 155,000 codes and can accommodate a host of new diagnoses and procedures.
A related second final rule adopts an updated X12 standard, Version 5010, for certain electronic healthcare transactions, an updated version of the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs standard, Version D.0, for electronic pharmacy-related transactions, and a standard for Medicaid pharmacy subrogation transactions. The final rule also delays the compliance date for the 5010 standards by 21 months, to Jan. 1, 2012.
Read the final rules for ICD-10 code sets and electronic transaction standards.
