AMA Wants ICD-10 To Be Delayed by Two Years, Texas Docs Ready for ICD-11

The American Medical Association (AMA) has urged the federal government to defer by at least two years its plan to move the compliance date of ICD-10 by one year, to Oct. 1, 2013. "A two-year delay of the compliance deadline for ICD-10 is a necessary first step," AMA officials said in a May 10 letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) acting administrator, Marilyn B. Tavenner.

The urging came hot on the heels of the statement of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) in a letter sent to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) secretary Kathleen Sebelius, saying HHS’s proposed one-year deferment of the ICD-10 compliance date was the perfect “middle ground.”

For many medical facilities and practices, as well as for providers of billing and coding online training, the proposed one-year delay in the implementation of ICD-10 allows for time to transition to the new code set. But it isn’t enough for many—or even necessary.

Significantly, AMA proposed in its letter that CMS put into play a process involving all stakeholders (including doctors, regulators, healthcare information technology professionals, medical coders, and administrators) to arrive at an alternative code set that is more appropriate and easier to implement than ICD-10. If no alternative is found, AMA wants ICD-10 postponed indefinitely.

AMA contended that doctors will fail to cope with the comprehensive financial and administrative burdens of a transition to ICD-10 even as they contend with “a number of inadequately aligned” federal programs and a proposed 31-percent Medicare reimbursement cut tentatively set for Jan. 1, 2013.
   
The Texas Medical Association, meanwhile, has joined AMA in calling on the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for an alternative to ICD-10—or for its scrapping altogether. Its contention is based on its central fear that the new diagnostic code set "will introduce great cost ... without a corresponding benefit."

The Texas group, for instance, has proposed that HHS either hold off until ICD-11 is ready (under development and will not be completed till 2015) or adopt a ready alternative, such as the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms, or Snomed CT, clinical coding system.

Like AMA, the group requested the HHS to push the compliance deadline by "a period of greater than one year" if it is to implement ICD-10 at all.

"The United States did not adopt the ICD-10 coding system 20 years ago when the standard was state-of-the-art," pointed out Dr. C. Bruce Malone, the Texas Medical Association president. "Now, it's nearing obsolescence."

Malone also said, HHS "should recognize that the costs of going to ICD-11 directly are less than incurring the remaining costs of implementing ICD-10 in 2014 and then implementing ICD-11 sometime soon thereafter."