CMS Delegates Adopt a Policy to Block ICD-10 AMA Says Conversion from ICD-9 Poses Too Many Costs

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CMS requires healthcare providers to start using ICD-10 by October 2013, but American Medical Association (AMA) delegates have embraced a resolution to block it.
Delegates to the AMA’s 65th House of Delegates Interim Meeting voted to work toward stopping implementation of diagnosis coding set ICD-10, which is scheduled to replace the current ICD-9 standard for billing medical services.  AMA leaders expressed concern over the administrative time and costs associated with the conversion. 
"The implementation of ICD-10 will create significant burdens on the practice of medicine with no direct benefit to individual patients' care," said AMA President Peter W. Carmel, MD. "At a time when we are working to get the best value possible for our health care dollar, this massive and expensive undertaking will add administrative expense and create unnecessary workflow disruptions. The timing could not be worse, as many physicians are working to implement electronic health records into their practices.”
The ICD-10 coding system provides much greater detail for describing illnesses and medical conditions, but is much more complex than ICD-9.  ICD-10 would impose 69,000 new codes on healthcare providers and coders.  In contrast, the current ICD-9 system has only 14,000 codes.