While much of the response in healthcare IT to a possible one-year delay to the ICD-10 compliance date has been negative, not everyone is down on that possibility.
Indeed, in an interview with The Washington Post, Rob Tennant, senior policy adviser for the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) laid out some of the positives to another delay to the compliance date of the coding system. He said that “a thousand different cogs that have to work smoothly” in order for ICD-10 to run and that many of those “cogs” are not ready.
The delay is part of a bill that would also provide a temporary one-year patch to the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula. The bill passed the House on Thursday and will now be moved onto a Senate vote, which according to CSPAN, will come on Monday. If it passes both the House and Senate, it will likely be signed into law by President Barack Obama, sources say.
The SGR formula determines how physicians are reimbursed for Medicare. The formula attempts to control growth in Medicare spending on physician fees by tying reimbursement to economic growth.
On the ICD-10 front, MGMA has been one of the prominent advocacy organizations that have stood behind another delay to the compliance deadline. The group conducted a survey of its members and found that less than 10 percent of physician practices are ready for the switch to ICD-10 code-set.
Despite this, Tennant told EHR Intelligence that MGMA was aligned with the other physician groups in opposing the bill in favor of a permanent fix to the SGR. He did, however, go onto to reiterate MGMA’s previous position that many in the industry were not ready for the ICD-10 code-set.
Another group that has been against the ICD-10 transition, the American Medical Association (AMA), would rather see a temporary repeal and replace to the SGR formula than a delay of the ICD-10 code-set. Since the bill was announced, it has been actively attempting to get its members to overturn the temporary pay patch.
Anita Samarath, CEO of Clinovations Government Solutions, a Washington D.C.-based consultancy, told Healthcare Informatics that groups like MGMA and the American Medical Group Association (AGMA) are serving constituents that would benefit from a delay. Further, she says, both these organizations and their constituents may see a financial windfall if the compliance date remained Oct. 1, 2014.
“Maybe they are doing the analysis finding their constituents are going to be negatively impacted by the (ICD-10) mapping if they do nothing. That means their revenues would go down as well,” Samarth says.
