The good news is that ICD-10 coding officials plan to release the lists of proposed new, revised and deleted codes as early as next week, as announced March 10 during a meeting at CMS headquarters in Baltimore.
But the list of changes – racked up during the five-year code freeze – will be huge: 1,900 new codes, 351 revised codes and 313 deletions – a total of 2,564 changes, officials said during the meeting of the ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee.
Normally, CMS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issue the list of proposed ICD changes as part of the proposed inpatient payment rule in mid-April. However, this time, perhaps because of the size of the update, the changes will be released a month early.
You can expect to see the full addenda – changes to the tabular section of the code set as well as the index -- in the usual time frame in June, if not sooner, according to Donna Pickett, the committee’s co-chair.
“We had a much longer freeze than anticipated,” Pickett explained, referring to the two postponements for ICD-10 adoption. Over that time, the Coordination and Maintenance Committee received more than 162 proposals for code changes, she added.
The committee adopted the code freeze as of Oct. 1, 2011, holding off most changes to the ICD-10 code set until one year after the codes took effect. That freeze will be lifted as of Oct. 1 this year.