CMS Not Backing Down to AMA on ICD-10 Conversion

The American Medical Association believes “stopping the implementation of ICD-10 is a critical, necessary step for removing regulatory burdens on physicians and ensuring that small physician practices are able to keep their doors open,” so it has asked the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) to skip it in favor of waiting on ICD-11.

CMS has now responded that it is “working collaboratively with all industry leaders for the ICD-10 implementation and is currently developing our reply to the AMA’s letter,” according to a recent report at the EHR Intelligence website.

In its letter last year to CMS, the AMA stated that converting to ICD-10 “will create significant burdens on the practice of medicine with no direct benefit to individual patient care, and will compete with other costly transitions associated with quality and health IT reporting programs” AMA’s House of Delegates has called for CMS to eliminate the implementation of the ICD-10 code set, which will become the new standard for Medicare billing starting Oct. 1, 2014.

The website also spoke with Kathy DeVault, manager of professional practice resources at the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), who said ICD-11 is not even close to being rolled out. “The World Health Organization (WHO) is starting the development of ICD-11, with its plan for a beta test to be available in 2015,” DeVault told EHR Intelligence.  “What that means for the US is the soonest we’d be able to convert to ICD-11 would be somewhere around 2022 to 2025.”

According to DeVault, ICD-11 will not be ready for a decade at least, and ICD-9 is 3o years old.