Physician groups Urge CMS to Create Contingency Plans for ICD-10 Transition March 6, 2015 AMA, CMA ICD-10 0 The California Medical Association (CMA), American Medical Association (AMA), and 98 other state and specialty societies urged the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to put contingency plans in place for the October transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 to avoid possible failures that could result in significant disruptions for physicians and Medicare patients. According to a recent end-to-end testing by CMS, if ICD-10 were implemented today, claims acceptance rates would fall from 97% to 81%, and cause a catastrophic backlog of millions of unpaid Medicare claims. In their letter, CMA and other groups argued that the actual acceptance rate for claims could actually be much worse because those physicians that participated in the testing are better prepared for the ICD-10 transition than many of their peers. CMA, AMA, and the other groups are asking CMS to conduct end-to-end testing in all modes of practice for a larger sample of physicians and to publicly release the results. The groups are also asking CMS to provide advance payments to physicians in the event that claims are delayed. “The likelihood that Medicare will reject nearly one in five of the millions of claims that go through our complex health care system each day represents an intolerable and unnecessary disruption to physician practices,” said AMA President Robert M. Wah, M.D. “Robust contingency plans must be ready on day one of the ICD-10 switchover to save precious health care dollars and reduce unnecessary administrative tasks that take valuable time and resources away from patient care.” Click here to read the letter. Click here to read the original article. Comments are closed.
