Sports teams often look for that seminal moment. That game, that play, that trade where the fortunes of a season, an organization are transformed. For ICD-10 let’s call that day February 11, 2015. The day that the House and Energy Commerce Committee’s sub-committee on Health heard from industry constituents about the state of ICD-10 readiness and its ability to facilitate transformation in healthcare.

Individuals representing physician groups, hospitals, HIM trade associations, insurance carriers, and technology vendors led what was largely a congressional cheerleading session (with some diplomatic governmental bashing for good measure) supporting the current implementation date of October 1, 2015. Benefits were touted, support of other government initiatives including meaningful use and value based reimbursement were articulated, myths were dispelled, and stories of success were shared.

If this never ending season of ICD-10 is to turnaround, perhaps this was that seminal moment we are all looking for. A selection of quotes from speakers is included below. For a full transcript of presentations and video testimony click here.

• Edwin M. Burke, MD, Beyer Medical Group: “On a busy Monday morning, October 7, 2013 we took on ICD‐10 and we haven’t looked back. We did not have special training. We did not spend ANY money in preparation. We did not see less patients and our practice did not suffer. As providers, it was not frustrating or scary. It just ‘was’”.
• Rich Averill, Director of Public Policy, 3M Health Information Systems: “The biggest frustration with DRGs updates is that reasonable proposed DRG modifications from the health care providers often cannot be considered because there are no ICD-9 codes available to evaluate the proposal”.
• Sue Bowman, Senior Director, Coding Policy and Compliance, American Health Information Management Association: “The development of ICD-10 involved extensive input from the healthcare industry, particularly the physician community. A number of physician organizations, including medical specialty societies, continue to actively participate in the ongoing maintenance of ICD-10 by requesting additional clinical detail. Ninety-five percent (95%) of the requests for new ICD-10-CM codes in the past three years came from physician organizations”.
• Kristi A. Matus, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer, Athena Health: “Repeated delays in deadlines associated with key goals of our nation’s ambitious, bipartisan healthcare agenda undermine the government’s credibility and impede progress on crucial initiatives”.
• William Jefferson Terry, MD, Mobile Urology Group: “CMS and the coding industry have said that it can take a year to adequately prepare for this transition. If we must transition, ICD-10 implementation should be incremental – carried out over 2-3 years, which we believe CMS and other health insurers’ administrative systems are capable of”.
• Carmella Bocchino, Executive Vice President of Clinical Affairs and Strategic Planning, America’s Health Insurance Plans: “…the more specific diagnosis and procedure information in ICD-10 will support better correlation of the outcomes achieved from different medical processes, yielding much more actionable clinical outcome information and an improvement in care quality.”
• Dr. John Hughes, Professor of Medicine, Yale University: “…techniques such as minimally invasive surgery, which have been increasingly and successfully used in cardiac surgery, and are rapidly expanding into other surgical fields, cannot not be adequately described using the simplistic four digit structure of ICD‐9”.