Medicare plans additional testing for ICD-10

If you're not participating in this week's test of the ICD-10 coding change, you'll get a second chance soon.

Last week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that it would add a second week of acknowledgement testing for physicians and others who submit Medicare claims. It also provided more details about end-to-end testing with Medicare.

The announcement came in the form of an article revision on the Medicare Learning Network (MLN). According to the revision, CMS plans to offer a second week of acknowledgement testing in early May 2014.

The revised article also states that CMS will offer end-to-end ICD-10 testing in late July 2014 to a small sample group of providers. End-to-end testing tracks a claim from initial connectivity and claim submittal all the way through remittance advice (RA), denials, and refund requests. CMS’s goals for this test are to demonstrate that:

• Providers or submitters are able to successfully submit claims containing ICD-10 codes to the Medicare fee-for-service claims systems;

• CMS software changes made to support ICD-10 result in appropriately adjudicated claims (based on the pricing data used for testing purposes); and

• Accurate RAs are produced.

CMS will select more than 500 volunteer submitters for the project, choosing a broad cross-section of providers, suppliers, and other submitters and claims types. CMS will provide information on volunteering later this month and disseminate additional details about the test in a separate MLN Matters article.

– Kent Moore, Senior Strategist for Physician Payment for the American Academy of Family Physicians