General Surgery Coding Alert

Even though Medicare extended the deadline to convert from ICD-9 to ICD-10 until Oct. 1, 2015, the agency didn’t fully extend the freeze on changes to those code sets.

 

Remember: Prior to the implementation delay, CMS had agreed to freeze changes to ICD-9 and ICD-10 during the transition year. 

 

Change: Now that the implementation is delayed by one year, CMS has said that for Oct. 1, 2014, there will be limited code updates to both the ICD-9 and ICD-10 code sets to capture new technologies and diseases. For Oct. 1, 2015, there will be limited code updates to ICD-10 code sets to capture new technologies and diagnoses, but no updates to ICD-9.

 

Then, regular updates to ICD-10 begin on Oct. 1, 2016.

 

“What we do know is that, despite ongoing code freezes, changes have been made in the ICD-10-CM code set including changes to instructions in the tabular list, corrections to the alphabetical index and tweaks to the guidelines themselves,” says coding expert Lisa Selman-Holman of Selman-Holman & Associates and CoDR — Coding Done Right in Denton, Texas. “So don’t kid yourself that nothing is new.”