Come October, ICD-9 will be retired and ICD-10 will become the new gold standard in medical reporting. There’s a lot of information available on ICD-10 across the Internet which may be contributing to more confusion than help, especially when it comes to how it will affect various specialties within the medical community. As an ENT, ICD-10 will definitely affect you and your practice. Here are five things you need to know about ICD-10:
Download ICD-10 FAQ Guide Here
It’s Mandatory for all health practitioners falling under HIPAA
This applies to most ENTs as most of the diagnostic and inpatient procedures carried out fall under HIPAA. To find out if you fall under this category, first determine whether you do fall under HIPAA, as there are some ENTs who fall under other arrangements such as worker’s compensation and auto insurance. These are not required to transition to ICD-10. The CMS however, is encouraging even those that do not fall under HIPAA to transition as ICD-9 will no longer be supported by the general medical community after the October deadline.
What are the Core differences between ICD-9 and ICD-10?
One question many Otolaryngologists have been asking repeatedly is why replace something that has been working so well? Let’s take a moment and look at how far Otolaryngology has come over the last 20 years. We have to conclude that there’s a lot of data collected today that ICD-9 cannot capture. This is why ICD-10 had to be developed. It’s designed to capture medical information at an even more granular level to provide deeper insights into how medical care is offered and how it can be improved.
How will you handle all of the expanded codes?
With over 68,000 codes in ICD-10, almost five times what was in ICD-9, how do we handle it? This is a dilemma every doctor is facing today, wondering what set of rules or criteria they will use to parse all of these codes. Admittedly, there will be a significant increase in the codes you will need to report on, as an ENT. So there’s no denying that there will be a learning curve. Nevertheless, the codes will be an extended version of the codes from ICD-9, thus providing familiar ground for those conversant with ICD-9. You will however need to go through the ICD-10 compendium to get a good grip of the codes you’ll be working with. Understanding this, many of our clients at ENT-Cloud have switched to our managed billing services, eliminating a bulk of the worries to learn new coding as our healthcare billing professionals are well versed in ICD-10 and are prepared to manage any ENT practice through these changed.
ICD-10 will come with its own implementation challenges, but the benefit of transitioning far outweighs the challenges. Download our guide today to help you through this transition process.
