Congress needed just a week to throw a huge monkey wrench into the healthcare industry's plans for ICD-10 implementation. On March 26, House leadership introduced H.R. 4302, "Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014." By April 1, the bill had passed the Senate and been signed into law by President Obama.
Inpatient coders will see an entirely new coding system October 1 when they begin officially using ICD-10-PCS. However, MS-DRGs are not changing. The only thing that is changing is what codes map to a particular MS-DRG.
Physicians are never going to like receiving queries from coders and CDI specialists. They really won't like all the queries they will receive after the transition to ICD-10.
If you're not already actively using your hospital's PEPPER (Program for Evaluating Payment Patterns Electronic Report), you're missing out on a lot of valuable data.
