3 ms·

> The US is late to the party and the deadline for implementation of this for billing Medicare, Medicaid etc, has been pushed back from 2012 t0 2013 to 2014 to

> The US is late to the party and the deadline for implementation of this for billing Medicare, Medicaid etc, has been pushed back from 2012 t0 2013 to 2014 to 2015 because hospitals and physicians keep whining about the costs and administrative complexity, and certain politicians would like people to associate those costs and complexity with Obamacare, even though HHS adopted a final rule scheduling the transition to ICD in January 2009, a few days before Obama took office. Hospitals aren't thrilled about this change, but they haven't been clamoring particularly loudly over this issue (compared to others). There are rumors that Medicare itself isn't entirely ready for this change on a technical level (it requires a lot of costs on their end too, not just the hospitals), which is why the implementation has been delayed so many times. The most recent postponement (end of March 2014) was noteworthy because it was so sudden - the motion to postpone was expected not to pass until immediately before it was called (often a sign of backdoor shenanigans one way or the other). Of course, these discussions all happen behind closed doors, so there's no way of knowing for sure. But I wouldn't be so quick to credit hospitals with successfully lobbying to postpone ICD-10, especially since they've been incredibly ineffective at lobbying for a number of policy changes that they care about much more.

anigbrowl 12y ago
That's a good point which I had not considered. I assumed the delay was at the behest of lobbyists, because >90% of the complaints I've seen are from doctors and small clinic administrators, and the medical coding industry is suffering a rather severe labor shortage right now, which is driving wages up at the same time ICD-10 is expected to reduce productivity by about 50% (in terms of # of records processed, although the coding will be of far higher quality). Also, the government's own website seem pretty well organized so I assumed they had the backend stuff squared away. http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10/index.html?redirect=/icd10 http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10/index.html?redirect... It's not just a matter of hiring more people and training them quickly - medical coding is an accredited position requiring some 700 hours of training including classes in anatomy and other introductory medical topics. (I'm not a medical coder, I'm just quite interested in this topic because of family background - Dad was a national public health executive in Ireland, my sister's a clinician, and I had some early work experience in both administrative and clinical contexts).

anigbrowl 12y ago

That's a good point which I had not considered. I assumed the delay was at the behest of lobbyists, because >90% of the complaints I've seen are from doctors and small clinic administrators, and the medical coding industry is suffering a rather severe labor shortage right now, which is driving wages up at the same time ICD-10 is expected to reduce productivity by about 50% (in terms of # of records processed, although the coding will be of far higher quality). Also, the government's own website seem pretty well organized so I assumed they had the backend stuff squared away. http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10/index.html?redirect=/icd10 http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10/index.html?redirect... It's not just a matter of hiring more people and training them quickly - medical coding is an accredited position requiring some 700 hours of training including classes in anatomy and other introductory medical topics. (I'm not a medical coder, I'm just quite interested in this topic because of family background - Dad was a national public health executive in Ireland, my sister's a clinician, and I had some early work experience in both administrative and clinical contexts).