With clinics and other healthcare providers beginning to allocate more resources into ICD-10 readiness, ahead of next year's October deadline, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are also working to ensure this transition is accomplished as smoothly as possible. The federal agency has already released a number of online tools and webcast videos to better educate practices and vendors on the benefits of ICD-10, as well how to best accommodate its tens of thousands of new codes into an existing workflow. Now, CMS has planted flags for three weeks over the following year that will be devoted exclusively to ICD-10 testing.

EHR Intelligence reports that the CMS-appointed testing weeks will occur on November 17-21, 2014, and March 2-6 and June 1-5, 2015. These tests aim to help examine whether a practice's infrastructure can adequately make use of ICD-10, and what further measures, if any, may be necessary in order to best incorporate the new coding system into a physician's office or clinic.

"While submitters may test ICD-10 claims at any time through implementation, the ICD-10 testing weeks have been created to generate awareness and interest, and to instill confidence in the provider community that CMS and the Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) are ready and prepared for the ICD-10 implementation," CMS writes in its official statement. "These testing weeks will allow trading partner's access to MACs and CEDI for testing with real-time help desk support. The event will be conducted virtually and will be posted on the CMS website, the CEDI website and each of MAC's website."

With just over a year to go until implementation is due, now is the time for clinics and practices to upgrade their chiropractic EHR software to an ICD-10 compliant system.