On Thursday, James Madara -- executive vice president and CEO of the American Medical Association -- sent a letter asking HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to stop the federally mandated implementation of the ICD-10 coding system and re-evaluate the timelines associated with several federal health IT initiatives, Modern Healthcare reports (Conn, Modern Healthcare, 2/3).
Background on ICD-10
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. The switch from ICD-9 to ICD-10 code sets means that health care providers and insurers will have to change out about 14,000 codes for about 69,000 codes.
Health care providers and insurers have until Oct. 1, 2013, to adopt new ICD-10 code sets.
AMA's Previous Pushback
In November 2011, AMA's House of Delegates approved a resolution pledging to block the transition to ICD-10 code sets, saying the health care industry already is overburdened by requirements under the federal health reform law and health IT incentive programs.
Last month, Madara sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) asking him to halt the implementation of the ICD-10 coding system. Madara said the ICD-10 transition would "create significant burdens on the practice of medicine with no direct benefit to individual patient care."
Meanwhile, the American Health Information Management Association earlier this week issued a statement urging health care providers to continue working to implement ICD-10, despite AMA's efforts to block the coding change (iHealthBeat, 1/31).
Madara's Letter to HHS
In his latest letter, Madara writes that medical practices -- depending on their size -- could spend between $83,290 and $2.7 million to implement ICD-10 code sets (Manos, Healthcare IT News, 2/2).
He adds that the timing of the coding transition "could not be worse" because many physicians already are facing challenges complying with three federal health IT programs:
- The meaningful use program;
- The electronic prescribing program; and
- The physician quality reporting system (Goedert, Health Data Management, 2/2).
Madara writes, "In the wake of this onslaught of overlapping regulatory mandates and reporting requirements, HHS has an opportunity to ease the burdens on physician practices by halting the implementation of ICD-10 and calling on appropriate stakeholders -- including physicians, hospitals [and] payers -- to assess an appropriate replacement for ICD-9 within a reasonable time frame" (Modern Healthcare, 2/3).