The HHS secretary, given authority by a new law to set the new ICD-10 implementation date no earlier than Oct. 1, 2015, has not given any indication as of press time when the new deadline would be. But practices can take four steps now in the wake of the new legislation.

Along with SGR and ICD-10, several features padded out the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014 including some that affect enforcement of the two-midnight rule and determination of RVUs.

You’re leaving money on the table if you require changes to patients’ medications to justify billing for prescription drug management.

“You could embed key health information in the chip, like the patient’s allergies,” says a top industry figure. “Patients could also use the card as a key to open info in the cloud. Regardless of where you are, you would have real-time access.”

News on remittance codes, NPI errors, HPSA audits, and more.

The more doctors in the practice, the more the practice had spent on ICD-10 before the delay in the implementation of the new code set, according to a Part B News survey.

Providers could have one more year to prepare for ICD-10 after the U.S. House of Representatives voted “yes” via voice vote to a 12-month sustainable growth rate (SGR) patch bill March 27 that included an ICD-10 delay by at least one year to Oct. 1, 2015.

Based on the first batch of Medicare local coverage determinations (LCDs) with ICD-10 codes, practices should prepare to code to a higher specificity than in ICD-9 or risk denial.

Use new lists of payable ICD-10 codes to conduct a documentation gap analysis for your clinicians and help your staff understand the level of coding specificity that will be required for payment, recommends one coding expert.