Interest in ICD-10 Reporting Remains Unabated

With the enormous volume of reporting during recent years on the nation’s healthcare industry implementing the ICD-10 code set, one might conclude that the subject is now old news. After all, ICD10monitor began its coverage of the migration from ICD-9 to ICD-10 in 2011, via both its website as well as its Internet radio broadcasting.

But that’s not the case, according to ICD10monitor publisher Chuck Buck, who reports that visitors to the ICD10monitor website have dramatically increased of late.

“On the occasion of launching a revamped ICD10monitor website, we did an analysis of our circulation numbers, and were somewhat astonished by the growth the site has experienced,” Buck said. “Since 2013 until last year, our annual site visits experienced a 292-percent increase. Our annual site visits in 2016 topped 367,890 in all.”

Buck said the annual number of pages viewed on the website experienced a 530-percent growth during that same time, moving from 369,101 to 1,061,076 during the three-year period from 2013 to 2016.

“Our editorial mission has produced success as well. We are more than just reporters covering ICD-10 coding and documentation issues,” Buck said. “We are reporting on value-based purchasing and other new payment methodologies, as well such as the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA). We are breaking news on population health, physician engagement, and patient experience – and doing so with lively writing and careful editing. In essence, we are surpassing our own lofty expectations.”

Thanks to what has been described as a seamless transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10, it could have been surmised that there simply wasn’t much to report on in this area. But that hasn’t been the case.

“On the contrary,” Buck said. “We have been reporting on some of the potholes in the highway, including national coverage and local coverage determinations (NCDs) and (LCDs) and their impact on claims.”

Buck also said that early on in the implementation, ICD10monitor reported on errors in the translation of codes between ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM/PCS in the MS-DRG methodology. Some codes, he explained, did not impact MS-DRGs under ICD-9-CM, but did so for ICD-10 MS-DRGs – and vice versa. 

“We will continue to monitor and report on the progress that all healthcare stakeholders are experiencing in their respective implementations of ICD-10,” Buck said. “We believe the implementation is progressing through four phases that we will be monitoring: coding, reimbursement, process re-engineering, and quality.”

Looking ahead, Buck said his group believes there will be an even greater need to monitor coding and education services in the future, and that he anticipates an increase in the use of computer-assisted coding (CAC).

“As we are seeing the results of ICD-10 coding in the adjudication of claims that Medicare reimburses, we expect that there will be a phase of system re-engineering to correct those issues,” Buck said. “This phase, which we are now experiencing, will be feature a focus on quality – both the quality of coding as well as the quality of healthcare, which leads to value-based performance.”