The American Medical Association (AMA) is strongly urging Congress to stop the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's implementation of the ICD-10 code set. The appeal, contained in a letter, also urged the lawmakers to call on stakeholders to find a replacement for ICD-9, the current code set.
Set for implementation on Oct. 1, 2013, ICD-10 will require doctors and their office staff to deal with a staggering 68,000 codes, five times more than the current 13,000 codes of ICD-9. Significantly, it also entails providers of medical billing and coding training to update their course contents.
AMA contended in no uncertain terms in its letter that ICD-10 is devoid of any direct benefit to individual patient care and will only hugely burden medical practice. It also pointed out that the implementation will only compete with other expensive transitions involving quality and health information technology (IT) reporting programs.
In the letter, AMA CEO James L. Madara, MD, said that derailing ICD-10 and finding "an appropriate replacement for ICD-9 will help to keep adoption of [electronic health records] and physician participation in quality and health IT programs on track and reduce costly burdens on physician practices."
Whether AMA is right or not in its protest, the transition to ICD-10 is a major industry undertaking. Meditec.com medical transcription training and pharmacy technician classes, offers medical billing and coding training to those who want to take advantage of this suddenly-much-in-demand career.
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