About 87% of claims received during CMS’ third and final ICD-10 end-to-end testing week were found acceptable by Medicare contractors, CMS announced during an Aug. 27 MLN Connects Call. By comparison, about 88% of claims received were found acceptable during the testing week in April; 81% were acceptable in January.
 
“This testing was extremely successful,” Stacey Shagena, a technical advisor for CMS, said during the call.
 
CMS says the latest end-to-end testing week, held July 20-24, did not identify any system issues with home health claims or otherwise. And in some cases, testers appear to have “intentionally included errors in their claims to make sure that the claim would be rejected, a process often referred to as ‘negative testing,’” CMS noted in a release.
 
About 1,200 businesses including providers, clearinghouses and billing agencies submitted ICD-10 claims during the July testing and had them processed through billing systems. This includes nearly 500 providers that participated in prior end-to-end testing weeks.
 
About 1.8% of claims were rejected due to invalid submission of ICD-10 diagnosis or procedure code, and about 2.6% of claims were rejected due to invalid submission of ICD-9 diagnosis or procedure code.
 
Most claims errors were unrelated to ICD-9 or ICD-10. Errors included incorrect national provider identifier (NPI), dates of service outside the range valid for testing and invalid HCPCS codes.
 
“Most rejects were the result of provider submission errors in the testing environment that would not occur when actual claims are submitted for processing,” CMS’ release states.
 
End-to-end testing processes claims through all Medicare system edits to produce and return an accurate electronic Remittance Advice. In January, April and July combined, there were more than 2,700 testers and about 67,000 test claims were processed.
 
Related link: View July’s end-to-end testing results at http://go.cms.gov/1EkVUJY.