A coalition of health care groups sent a letter to House and Senate leaders urging them to ensure that ICD-10 implementation is not delayed again, Clinical Innovation & Technology reports (Walsh, Clinical Innovation & Technology, 11/18).

Background

U.S. health care organizations are working to transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 code sets to accommodate codes for new diseases and procedures.

In April, President Obama signed into law legislation (HR 4302) that pushed back the ICD-10 compliance date until at least October 2015.

In July, CMS announced a final rule that established Oct. 1, 2015, as the new ICD-10 compliance deadline for payers and providers still making the transition (iHealthBeat, 11/14).

Letter Details

The letter was written by a group of 15 organizations, which referred to themselves as the Coalition for ICD-10. The groups included:

• The American Health Information Management Association;
• America's Health Insurance Plans;
• The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives; and
• The Healthcare Financial Management Association (Clinical Innovation & Technology, 11/18).

In the letter, the Coalition for ICD-10 wrote that it "strongly supports the recently announced Oct. 1, 2015, compliance date and opposes any steps to delay this implementation ate" (Coalition for ICD-10 letter, 11/12).

The coalition argued that previous delays have been "disruptive and costly" (Bowman, FierceHealthIT, 11/18). It added that HHS has estimated that further delays would cost an additional $1 billion to $6.6 billion (Coalition for ICD-10 letter, 11/12).

The coalition also argued that many health care providers had already prepared for the initial implementation date, noting that about three-quarters of hospitals and health systems "were confident in their ability to successfully implement ICD-10" (Clinical Innovation & Technology, 11/18).

Further, the letter listed several benefits of adopting ICD-10, such as providing medical coding, population health management and tracking of disease outbreaks, such as Ebola (Coalition for ICD-10 letter, 11/12).