This week, WEDI submitted a letter to the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, encouraging the agency to consider additional Medicare testing prior to ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS (ICD-10) implementation. WEDI periodically advises on and brings attention to issues related to healthcare information exchange and other areas.

WEDI has been working with public and private sectors of the industry to facilitate execution of ICD-10 and recognizes this change in medical code sets may be the single largest technical, operational and business implementation in the healthcare industry in the past thirty years. As such, WEDI believes thorough testing with a range of trading partners – hospitals, physicians (large and small practices from different medical specialties), clinics, clearinghouses and Medicare secondary payers will be critical to avoid significant disruption to the industry. This will give the industry a higher level of confidence that the Medicare claims processing system will operate as intended when ICD-10 goes live on Oct. 1, 2014. Finally, WEDI suggests both organizations closely monitor industry progress and early testing results to better gauge what may happen when ICD-10 implementation goes into effect.

Read the full letter and discover what obstacles influenced WEDI to submit this to HHS.