Healthcare providers and medical practices have been abuzz over the past week with the news that ICD-10, the industry's solution to the aging ICD-9 coding system, had been delayed yet again — this time to October 1, 2015, at the earliest. The news came as relief to those whose chiropractic EHR software wasn't yet in place for the transition and a headache for others who had been building momentum to a deadline for this year. To say that there are questions and a general sense of confusion floating around now would be an understatement, a fact that's only further exacerbated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) silence on the matter.

Industry news source Health Data Management noted yesterday that while healthcare groups and providers have been reevaluating their timelines in order to map out a new route to ICD-10 implementation, CMS has yet to comment on the matter. In fact, strangely enough, the federal agency has done little over the last 10 days to provide any kind of insight into budgetary and technical complications that the coding system's delay may be causing for practices and clinics.

"We hope [we will hear from CMS] very soon but we don't know exactly," Sue Bowman, senior director of coding policy and compliance for the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), told the source. "There's a lot of discussion about what they need to do and what the process will be."

While AHIMA and similar groups are planning to meet later this month for an "emergency industry summit" to discuss the effects of the ICD-10 delay, a CMS spokesman told Health Data Management that the federal agency will "provide guidance to providers and other stakeholders soon."

By bringing your clinic's coding systems up-to-date with the best chiropractic EHR software available, you can streamline administrative duties without disruptions to your workflow.