What’s In Store For Health IT In 2014?

Brian Ahier | HL7 Standards | January 23, 2014

2013 was a good year for health IT and has laid the foundation for 2014 to be the biggest year ever for the industry.

ICD-10

The current deadline to implement ICD-10 is very unlikely to change. The federal government already allowed a one-year delay in the compliance deadline for the nationwide conversion to the ICD-10 code sets. That delay moved the compliance deadline to Oct. 1, 2014, and I don’t see much chance it will be pushed out further (most of the rest of the developed world has been using ICD-10 for years).

“These new standards are a part of our efforts to help providers and health plans spend less time filling out paperwork and more time seeing their patients,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a news release announcing the deadline. This is a revolutionary change to ICD coding from the current 17,000 codes under ICD-9 to more than 155,000 codes under ICD-10, including about 68,000 diagnostic codes.