When implementation is only a few days away, some people are concerned that NJ’s smaller practices are going to suffer, and patient claims will see a delay. There will be a momentous change in the medical industry on Thursday.

The change has been in the making for 10 years, and will have an impact on everyone, who makes a diagnosis, fills out or processes an insurance claim, or waits for the payment of that claim.

ICD-10 is the tenth revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, and is all set to go into effect. Along with this, the 14,000 medical codes that are used in describing a diagnosis will grow rapidly to 69,000.

In terms of pessimists, the change indicates that the chances that something will go wrong between the doctor’s office and a paid claim will become fivefold.

However, optimists and advocates for the new codes have said that they are going to make insurance claims systems more precise, which means the need for insurers to ask follow-up questions of administrators at hospitals and medical offices will reduce.

It’s been more than 10 years that the change in codes for diagnoses and procedures has been in the making. The change has earlier faced three delays because providers expressed concern regarding the speed with which it was being implemented.

ICD-10’s introduction was prompted because of the fact that medical coding hadn’t been revised since 1979. This fact left a small room in the present set of codes, ICD-9, for any conditions.

ICD-10 is the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), a medical classification list by the World Health Organization (WHO). It contains codes for diseases, signs and symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or diseases.

“It slows down production of claims absolutely, so productivity is going to be hit,” he said.