被问及CMS如何促进医疗保健诊断与计费代码从ICD-9到ICD-10代码集的转换时，医疗保险与医疗救助服务中心行动管理员Kerry Weems给出这一建议。

美国医疗信息管理协会在西雅图召开的第80届年度会议上，成员多次提到这一问题，并讨论医疗保健诊断的变化。它所建议的改变是全面性的，并涉及众多工作在该领域的人员。

随着医院、医生、付费者与其他采用新代码或用其更换软件，它意味着高成本。它还意味着，不但要学习处理额外的字母数字项，还要学习处理15.5万多个代码（相较于ICD-9中的1.7万个）。

CMS建议的时间为2011年10月1日，但是CMS重审该行业所有领域的评论之前，转变的最终期限尚不能确定。而政府在最终期限这一方面一向是犹豫不定的。

'When' is critical to driving the switch to ICD-10, says CMS chief

By Bernie Monegain, Editor

2008年10月15日 星期三

That's the advice of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service Acting Administrator Kerry Weems, when asked Tuesday about how CMS could help drive the conversion of healthcare diagnostic and billing codes from ICD-9 to ICD-10 code sets.

That issue came up often as members of the American Health Information Management Association, in Seattle for the organization's 80th annual convention, discussed changing healthcare diagnostic and It's a proposed sweeping change that has many who work in the field jittery.

It means high costs as hospitals, physicians, payers and others adapt or replace their software for the new code. It also means learning to deal not only with extra alpha-numeric digits, but also with more than 155,000 codes, compared to the 17,000 in ICD-9.

The date in CMS' proposed rule is Oct. 1, 2011, but a deadline for conversion will not be set until CMS reviews comments that are flowing in from all sectors of the industry. And the government has been known to be wishy-washy on the deadline.