The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released the ICD-10 Procedure Coding System (ICD-10-PCS) for the financial year 2017. Along with that, a set of documents including the addenda for the ICD-10-PCS Index and Tables, the Official Coding and Reporting Guidelines, procedure codes and file layout model, the order file with long and short descriptions of the codes, and a conversion table for 2016 to 2017 codes were also released. The agency also said that the Reference Manual, Power Point slides, and the document describing the development of the ICD-10-PCS would not be updated after the end of 2016 fiscal year.
There are around 76,000 ICD-10-PCS codes in the release, new ones being spotted in the Administration, Medical and Surgical, Extracorporeal Therapies, Measurement and Monitoring, and New Technology sections. Where the Administration section got 39 changes, taking the total count to 1,427 codes, the Medical and Surgical section saw the maximum number of changes, and home around 65,676 codes now. The New Technology section got 27 new codes that hint about the procedures, devices, and substances to be approved for add-on payments to MS-DRG v34 next year. The Extracorporeal Therapies got just 4 new codes, making the count go 46.
The American Hospital Association highlighted that the changes in the ICD-10 coding system is a result of the “freeze on updates” seen on it before the October 1 implementation date. Experts also said that the healthcare providers would now have to update themselves on thousands of new codes to streamline and coordinate better care. The most noted change in the new coding system is the revision of the definition of root operations, Control and Creation; addition of ‘Perfusion’, a new root operation; and the change in terminologies used for Heart and Great Vessels Body System. The ICD-10-PCS codes are available on the CMS website.
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