• You’ve made the switch to ICD-10 coding. Now what?

    It’s been more than five months since ICD-10 became the required standard for coding and billing patient encounters in the United States, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) wants to make sure your office is using ICD-10 not just correctly but productively. CMS has released the Next Steps Toolkit, a free resource that offers specific suggestions and recommendations in these areas:

    Assessing your progress. Practices should compare current performance to a pre-ICD-10 baseline or establish a baseline for making future comparisons. Tracking key performance indicators such as rates of rejection and denial is the first step to improvement.

    Addressing your findings. Systematically collecting and answering questions from staff and analyzing your clinical documentation and code selection as needed can help head off future problems and fix current ones.

    Maintaining your progress. Physicians should make sure their systems capture annual ICD-10 updates, which take place in October.

    For more information, visit CMS’s ICD-10 website and other resources, including this list of contacts, by state, for Medicare and Medicaid questions. 

    Posted on Mar 03, 2016 by David Twiddy


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