Who gets benefit from ICD-10 delay? CureMD 13:26

The Protecting Access to Medicare Act 2014 has been signed into law by Obama that effectively patches the sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula into action and delays ICD-10 to Oct 1, 2015.

Reactions within the healthcare industry to the news of ICD-10 delay are similar to those of the teachers in school delaying the final exam. Students who are unprepared feel delighted and look forward to the spare time received to prepare and study for upcoming exams. But those students who have studied intensively, worked hard and paid for the tutors and spent a great amount of time, energy and effort for the upcoming exams are upset that their efforts have been wasted and they have to spend their time and resources again in order to be prepared for the exams in 2015.

So who is actually relieved?

• Ill –Prepared Vendor: Not all vendors are certain that their vendors are ready for the ICD-10 transition.
• Payers and CMS: Many providers have reported that payers are still not ready for testing. Like Medicare that won’t start the ICD-10 end to end testing until the end of July.
• AMA and Physician Practices: The AMA doesn’t want to move to ICD-10 entirely. They approximate that the cost of switching to ICD-10 will range from $225,000 to $8 million for practices which will force many out of business.
• Providers who need more testing, implementation, training or optimization: KLAS spoke with many different providers and they welcomed the delay as one of them says:  “we have breathed a sigh of relief on hearing the announcement. We will adjust our timeline for training and revise our plan accordingly.”