Now that the ICD-10 coding system has been up and running for just over a month, we are starting to see some reports back from the trenches. And those reports are surprisingly good.
The sky did not fall in and the world did not come to an end. For most practices, denials did not go through the roof. Robert Tennant, senior policy advisor for the Medical Group Management Association, was at a Town Hall meeting a couple of weeks ago with Humana and Emdeon (a medical claims clearinghouse) and both organizations reported that they were seeing no great increase in denials and no big drop in the number of claims submitted.
As most experts anticipated, the key was preparation. Practices that had updated their EHRs as well as learned and tested the new codes are getting along just fine. Gary Hirschfield, an ophthalmologist in Queens, N.Y. said that the ICD-10 transition "is not effecting me one iota. Zero stress."
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