For those healthcare organizations that don't yet have a picture of the advantages ICD-10 will bring, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has outlined some of the most important ones.

Joining the all-too-sparse collection of reports explaining such ICD-10 advantages, CMS, when it updated its ICD-10 FAQs, replied to the simple question “what are the benefits of ICD-10?”

[Related: Noblis top 10 ICD-10 list. Podcast: The upside of sibling rivalry between HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10.]

That answer came in the form of nine bullet points:

1 Measuring the quality, safety and efficacy of care
2 Designing payment systems and processing claims for reimbursement
3 Conducting research, epidemiological studies, and clinical trials
4 Setting health policy
5 Operational and strategic planning and designing healthcare delivery systems
6 Monitoring resource utilization
7 Improving clinical, financial, and administrative performance
8 Preventing and detecting healthcare fraud and abuse
9 Tracking public concerns and assessing risks of adverse public health events

ICD10Watch included Milliman's list of seven ICD-10 benefits in our opening salvo, in which Forrester vice president and research director Eric Brown explains that healthcare organizations “don't want to wait and wait and wait until the last minute and then have to attack [ICD-10] like a fire drill. That will only cost more money for lesser results.”