ICD-10 is a system of procedure codes widely used worldwide to make administrative medical claims both for research and billing of health services. On October 1, 2014 IDC-10-PCS coding will be expanded, a move guaranteed to overload the nation's healthcare system. The system is working well today with roughly 20,000 codes covering various disorders and medical contingencies. But the number of codes will be increased nearly eightfold to 155,000 next October. Many procedures will require multiple codes, in the interests of making the data more precise. This will require a huge amount of Information Technology remediation to go from the old to the new system. All medical providers will have to be retrained to code properly. If claims are not coded properly, they will be denied and the hospitals and practitioners will not be paid. The risk to hospitals is huge -- this will be a big "bump in the road," as Obama might put it. The burden on practitioners will be catastrophic, their indirect...(Read Full Post)