The Tennessee Medical Association and a group of co-sponsoring organizations are delivering a training program in six cities across the state this summer to help healthcare providers practice for a major overhaul of the coding protocols used for clinical diagnoses.
After years of delays, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will require the new ICD-10 codes for all healthcare transactions beginning Oct. 1. The change impacts all healthcare providers, payers and third party companies. Providers who fail to update technologies and business operations to transition properly will not get paid for their services.
“We’ve known this was coming for a long time, but many providers have postponed or abandoned their readiness because of the repeated governmental delays,” said TMA President Dr. John W. Hale, Jr., a family physician in Union City, Tenn. “The implementation deadline is finally here and we do not anticipate that it will be delayed again. We want to do everything we can to help Tennessee’s physician community avoid business interruptions by giving them the resources they need to transition smoothly.”
While TMA officials believe ICD-10 will move forward without delay, a variety of industry surveys suggest that too many healthcare providers are still not fully prepared. A November 2014 survey by Medical Economics, for instance, showed that half of the physicians who answered said they are not ready for ICD-10, mainly because cost, productivity and technology hurdles. In another survey in April 2015 by the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange, just 25 percent of providers indicated they had begun external ICD-10 testing, down from August 2014 when 33 percent had started the task.
“Medical practices have been exposed to all the ICD-10 lectures and overview material they can stomach," said TMA CEO Russ Miller. "Now is the time to make sure billing and coding personnel are ready. Oct. 1 is rapidly approaching. We are offering hands-on coding camps to let people practice the actual exercises they will have to use on a daily basis, specific to their medical specialties.”
TMA’s workshop series will be led by certified ICD-10 trainers from the American Academy of Professional Coders, the nation's largest training and credentialing organization for medical coding, billing, auditing and compliance.
Courses are offered in the following specialties with up to eight hours of Continuing Education Units for each session: Family Medicine/Internal Medicine, Orthopaedics, Pediatrics and a general, multispecialty workshop. Workshops for Cardiology and OB/GYN offer four hours of CEU.
Co-sponsoring organizations include AAPC, Tennessee Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Tennessee Chapter of the American College of Physicians, Cumberland Pediatric Foundation, Tennessee Chapter of the Medical Group Management Association, Tennessee Nurses Association and Tennessee Orthopedic Society.
The American Medical Association House of Delegates passed policy during its Annual Meeting in June calling for the AMA to pursue a two-year grace period for implementing ICD-10. TMA is supporting the effort and urging its members to ask Congress to keep physicians from being penalized for technical glitches, errors and/or malfunctions related to the transition.
For more information, visit tnmed.org/ICD-10.