Get Ready Now for ICD-10

News Updates | December 5, 2014
Get Ready NowWith less than a year to go before the October 1, 2015, compliance date, now is the time to get ready. Whether you’re a provider, payer, or other health care entity, it’s important to prepare for ICD-10 now. Visit the CMS ICD-10 website to learn how to make a plan that fits your needs. By working together, we can make a successful ICD-10 transition. Benefits of ICD-10 Foundational to advancing health care, the ICD-10 code set will replace ICD-9 codes for both diagnosis and inpatient procedures. Among its benefits, ICD-10: Better captures details about chronic illnesses, identifying underlying causes, complications of disease, and conditions that contribute to complexity of a disease Serves as a building block that allows for greater specificity and standardized data to better support patient care and improve disease management Improves data for peer comparison and utilization benchmarking and better documentation of patient complexity and level of care to support reimbursement for care provided Enhances public health surveillance and reporting—as well as quality measurement and reporting—with robust detail for research and data analysis Using ICD-10, doctors can capture much more detail, meaning they can better understand important information about the patient’s health. And by enabling more detailed patient history coding, ICD-10 can help to better coordinate a patient’s care across providers and over time. CMS Resources Can Help You Get ReadyTo help you prepare for ICD-10, CMS recently released two new Medscape videos and an expert column. Available on the CMS ICD-10 website, these resources provide guidance about the transition to ICD-10 with a focus on small practices. Continuing medical education (CME) and nursing continuing education (CE) credits are available to health care professionals who complete the learning modules. Anyone who completes the modules can receive a certificate of completion. The Road to 10 Tool, also available through the CMS ICD-10 website, gives an overview of ICD-10 and answers frequently asked questions. The tool is designed to help small practices jumpstart their transitions. Providers can build an ICD-10 action plan and review tailored clinical scenarios to learn more about how ICD-10 affects their practice.