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(www.cms.gov), 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(www.roadto10.org) and other resources(www.cms.gov), including this list of contacts(www.cms.gov), by state, for Medicare and Medicaid questions.