HHS TO START RULEMAKING PROCESS TO DELAY THE SWITCH

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, announced today that her Department will initiate the rulemaking process necessary to delay the switch to ICD-10-CM.  This stunning development comes as problems with a required predecessor of ICD-10-CM mount.  This predecessor is the 5010 standard, which we described in a previous post.  Problems with 5010 have been mounting since last summer and fall. Additional pressure has been mounting against 5010 in recent weeks.  Finally, overburdened with unfunded mandates by the federal government, physicians finally began to push back last month, with the AMA urging against the switch (see here and here).

Of course, hospitals and doctors predicted a long time ago that ICD-10-CM and electronic health record adoption would compete for limited resources, and thus that one or the other would have to give. It's long past time that the federal government has seen the light.

We hope that the federal government will similarly come to the realization that the switch is not worth it, and call it off altogether.