Once again federal regulators have pushed back the compliance deadline to implement ICD-10 medical coding sets. CMS Acting Administrator Marilyn Tavenner told reporters yesterday at the AMA's National Advocacy Conference in Washington, D.C., that her agency would "re-examine the timeframe" for ICD-10. The original implementation deadline of Oct. 1, 2011, was pushed back to Oct. 1, 2013. No word yet of a new deadline.

ICD-10 is a new set of codes that will be used by doctors, surgical centers and hospitals to describe medical services in bills they send to insurers. It will expand the number of codes in use from around 18,000 in the current ICD-9 code set to about 140,000. The new codes are said to make it easier to describe advanced surgeries and procedures that generally command higher reimbursement rates.

Doctors, however, complain that changing to the new system will eat up time and money. The American Medical Association has called ICD-10 a "significant burden on the practice of medicine with no direct benefit to individual patient care."

Dan O'Connor