Posted on July 15, 2015 I Written By 
John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit andLinkedIn.




The intense pushback from physicians regarding conversion to ICD-10 by October 1, 2015 has led to an "interim agreement". 
"With the announcement that came a little over a week ago about CMS and AMA working together on ICD-10, does that mean that we can officially say that ICD-10 is going to happen? The ICD-10 Watch blog has a good summary of what CMS committed to do in the announcement:
  • CMS is creating an ICD-10 Ombudsman to deal with healthcare providers’ ICD-10 problems. More on how this will work later.
  • Without using the words “safe harbor” or “grace period,” CMS promises that Medicare will not deny any medical claims “based solely on the specificity of the ICD-10 diagnosis code as long as the physician/practitioner used a valid code from the right family.”
  • Quality reporting programs such as Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), Value Based Modifier (VBM), or Meaningful Use 2 (MU) will suspend penalties that may result because of lack of specificity.
  • There will be advance payments available if the Medicare system has problems.
The second and fourth items have gotten all the buzz. Most have interpreted that the second one means that CMS won’t deny ICD-10 claims that weren’t done correctly. That’s an overstatement, but it does decrease the number of denied claims that will occur with the switch to ICD-10. The fourth item listed above was a major concern that I raised, but it applied to all payers and not just CMS. So, it’s nice that CMS has addressed the cash flow challenges that slow claims processing of ICD-10 claims will cause, but that still leaves all the other payers.
With the “peace treaty” signed between AMA and CMS, can we finally say that ICD-10 will not be delayed again? One person suggested to me that it just leaves the AHA as a possible opponent that could stop it. However, I also heard it suggested that they weren’t looking for a delay.
While usually avoiding trying to predict the unpredictable Washington, I’m going to say that we can safely assume that ICD-10 will not be delayed again. We might see an overture or two still that tries to delay it, but if I were putting my money down in Vegas I’d put it all on No ICD-10 Delay in 2015. Are you putting your organization’s “bet” in the same place?"
It is all a bit like "Groundhog Day', the comedic movie starring Bill Murray. Here we go again !

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