Greenup County Health Department Blog

Implementation of ICD-10 Set for 2013

Oct. 1, 2013, is the “firm date” for implementation of the new ICD-10 coding system for medical diagnoses, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

“A number of you have contacted us [about rumored delays], but I can assure you that this is a firm date,” Pat Brooks, senior technical adviser with CMS’ Hospital and Ambulatory Policy Group, said during a conference call with providers on Tuesday. Any claims submitted to Medicare on or after that date will not be accepted unless they use the new codes, Brooks stressed.

The ICD-10 is the 10th edition of the International Classification of Diseases, the manual most commonly used for coding medical diagnoses. ICD-10 has two parts: ICD-10-CM contains diagnosis codes, and ICD-10-PCS contains inpatient procedure codes.

Physicians who see only outpatients will not have to deal with ICD-10-PCS; they can continue using Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes for outpatient procedures. However, for diagnosis codes, they still will need to transition to ICD-10-CM from the ICD-9 codes currently in use, Brooks said.

ICD-10 diagnosis codes differ from ICD-9 codes in several respects, she noted:

• ICD-10 codes have three to seven characters, compared with three to five characters for ICD-9;
• ICD-10 codes always use a letter for their first character, while ICD-9 codes can have either a letter or a number as their first character;
• ICD-10 codes may include an “x” placeholder — something not used in ICD-9 codes.

But the biggest difference between the two coding sets is the number of codes involved. Because they are more complex and detailed, ICD-10 includes 69,099 diagnosis codes compared with only 14,315 ICD-9 codes.