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Dear :
CMS announced yesterday that for a one year period starting October 1, Medicare claims will not be denied solely on the specificity of the ICD-10 diagnosis codes provided, as long as the physician submitted an ICD-10 code from an appropriate family of codes. In spite of the announcement of this grace period for implementation, we still face major obstacles with ICD-10-CM.
Did you know that the rest of the world will not be using ICD-10-CM making our data useless because it will not match other countries? And did you know that the implementation of ICD-10-CM will require physicians and their staff to transition to a system that makes use of 68,000 new codes?
As we all know, physicians in the United States are already drowning in a regulatory tsunami. Now physicians face the threat of ICD-10-CM implementation with unfunded mandatory requirements. ICD-10 implementation is based on a liberal interpretation of a weak clause in HIPAA that actually only requires an update to ICD-9 and says nothing about ICD-10 or beyond. Further, the highly regulated health care industry has been handed over to an under-regulated health information technology (IT) industry and various other providers in health care.
Since Congress has been unwilling to delay the implementation day of Oct. 1, 2015 for ICD-10-CM, ASIPP began an aggressive campaign this week to reach out to legislators asking them to postpone ICD-10-CM by contacting multiple senators and representatives.
It is important that each physician and staff send a letter right away. We have very little time to convince Congress to act. We have set up a letter in Capwiz to make this easy for everyone.
This is an easy way to make a huge impact! Please commit to joining us in this important letter writing campaign asking Congress to delay this unfunded implementation. We need the full support and action from our members.
Join us in our efforts by sending your letters today.
Thanks,
Peter and Lax
Peter S. Staats, MD
President, ASIPP
Laxmaiah Manchikanti, MD
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, ASIPP
