In addition to the code proposals presented at the March ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Meeting, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also announced more than 5,000 projected new diagnosis and procedure codes, marking the official end of the ICD code freeze. There’s no need to panic, though. None of the codes will be implemented in April, giving providers and payers plenty of time before October 1, 2016, to update their systems and familiarize themselves with the new codes.
Rather than wait until this summer to release the whole update at once, CMS and CDC are posting all the codes already approved and effective October 1, 2016, on their websites. CMS posted the fiscal 2017 ICD-10-PCS code list March 9, and the CDC will post the fiscal 2017 ICD-10-CM code list during the week of March 14 through the 18.
Of the 3,651 new ICD-10-PCS codes, 97 percent relate to cardiovascular procedures. The rest are scattered among joint procedures, intracranial administration of substance, face and hand transplants, and donor organ perfusion. There will be 487 revised procedure codes, most having to do with revisions of heart and great vessels.
More than 1,900 new diagnosis codes are slated for fiscal 2017, along with 313 deletions and 351 revised codes. One code proposal presented in the March C&M meeting was for the Zika virus. This is the only code proposal from the March meeting that will be expedited for an effective date of October 1, 2016, instead of October 1, 2017.
CMS will release its proposed rule for the inpatient prospective payment system in April 2016, and it will publish the final rule as well as updates to the general equivalence mappings (GEMs) in August.
Ideas for new codes to be discussed at the September ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee meeting must be submitted by July 15.
The final addendum with the new diagnosis and procedure codes for fiscal 2017 will be posted in June 2016 on the CMS and CDC websites as follows:
ICD-10-CM addendum: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/icd/icd10cm.htm
ICD-10-PCS addendum: http://cms.hhs.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10/index.html
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