ICD-10 Implementation Delays Costing Millions, says ICD 10 Proponents

ICD-10 Proponents Say Delay Costing Millions

 

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has howls coming from both sides of the fence after her agency announced that they would "initiate a process" to "examine the pace" of ICD-10's implementation—in effect, delaying the compliance date for ICD-10. 

The ICD-10 proponents—including quality leaders, providers, and vendors, as well as providers of medical billing and coding training—insist that ICD-10 should not be delayed, or at the very least, that the postponement be short-lived and limited in scope.

"Our stance is, we're opposed to any kind of delay," declared Sue Bowman, director of Coding Policy and Compliance for the 64,000-member American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA). Bowman bewailed Sebelius’s seeming ignorance of the fact that "an enormous amount of money has been poured into this process [transition preparations] already by the healthcare industry—many, many millions." Now they will have to spend a lot more due to the delay.

Bowman pointed out that organization leaders had informed her that more money would now be spent because they would have to do things all over again, even relaunching new training programs. 

To bolster its position, AHIMA has sent out a survey to its members "to learn how much their organizations have already spent on ICD-10 and how much different lengths of delay would cost them additionally." 

Meditec.com, like other providers of online medical coding training—as well as medical transcription training and medical office assistant training—provides the coursework the medical coding community needs to be ready for ICD-10.