Medical codingI have tried to find any mention of the new ICD-10 billing system that was supposed to come online this year, but apparently I am missing it on your website. I know ADP has a hand in it, and 3M along with some medical program-specific companies. I have a little ADP in my portfolio, but 3M is a little more per share than I am willing to pay. Any interesting low-cap participants in this transition process to watch? I mean, it’s going to affect the whole country’s healthcare billing system.
This is a discussion topic or guest posting submitted by a Stock Gumshoe reader. The content has not been edited or reviewed by Stock Gumshoe, and any opinions expressed are those of the author alone.
From what little I gleaned from a quick look at the government sites on this, it doesn’t look like a huge deal to me. It will likely lead to some consulting and billing companies having a good year since the transition will be a bit tougher than most years, but codes change every year. This particular change is to a more granular coding system for medical billing, a substantially larger shakeup to the coding system than the annual updates that people had gotten used to. It’s really aimed at in-hospital procedures but the coding change applies to anyone who is subject to HIPAA, which is pretty much anyone who sees patients as far as I can tell. I’ll be self-serving and suggest a look at Xerox (XRX), since I own shares and they have a large healthcare business services/IT division, but it’s certainly not a small cap — I’m not familiar with any strong small caps in the healthcare records management/billing space, but there probably are some. The implementation is now October 2014, the basic govt info is available here: http://cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10/