The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently conducted ICD-10 acknowledgement testing and accepted 76 percent of claims submitted.
Acknowledgement testing is the most basic level of testing for ICD-10. It determines simply whether or not a payer information system can accept ICD-10 claims. In this scenario, CMS verifies whether test claims had a valid diagnosis code that matched the date of service, a National Provider Identifier (NPI) that was valid for the submitter ID used for testing, and an ICD-10 companion qualifier code to allow for processing of claims. CMS has said it will conduct more thorough end-to-end tests, which determines whether or not a claim has gone through to the payer and back to the provider, in 2015. It will also do more acknowledgement testing.
The latest round of acknowledgement testing included 13,700 claims submitted from more than 500 providers, suppliers, billing companies, and clearinghouses. The acceptance rate improved as the week went on, with Friday’s rate reaching 87 percent.
ICD-10 has become a battleground for many in health IT and healthcare. Medical groups, such as the American Medical Association, are pushing for another delay to the compliance deadline. Recently, they tried to get that delay included in the Congressional spending bill. Others, like the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) have fought back and aimed to keep the compliance date on track.
