Here's how the ICD-10 delay prevented some housecleaning at AHIMA

The American Health Information Management Association got a reminder of the law of unintended consequences earlier this year when Congress surprised the healthcare world with its decision to extend the deadline for ICD-10 diagnostic and procedural code implementation by at least a year.

The Chicago-based association for health information management professionals had a loading dock full of ICD-9 training materials about to be destroyed, according to AHIMA CEO Lynne Thomas Gordon. Gordon spoke Friday at a Modern Healthcare issue briefing breakfast in Chicago.

Luckily, AHIMA, which at that point already had trained tens of thousands of individuals in ICD-10 coding, was able to pull the ICD-9 materials back before they were destroyed.

The association subsequently repurposed a planned ICD-10 conference it had scheduled in Washington, D.C., April 22-23 to talk about ICD-9 instead, even printing additional ICD-9 materials for the event.

Other speakers at this Friday's issues breakfast seem to have made their own peace with the delay—the CMS since has scheduled ICD-10 implementation for Oct. 1, 2015—saying that while the postponement was disruptive to their IT planning processes, they were trying to use the additional time on projects that would eventually make the new coding system more effective and beneficial for their organizations.

Follow John N. Frank on Twitter: @MHJFrank