The move from ICD-9 to ICD-10, which replaces about 15,000 codes with approximately 68,000 new ones, comes at a time when care providers are already under the gun to implement and prove to the federal government the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHR).

ICD-10 codes provide more robust and specific data that will help improve patient care and enable the exchange of U.S. health care data with other nations already using ICD-10. Entities covered under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) will be required to use the ICD-10 diagnostic and procedure codes.

The changeover will probably cost larger hospitals between $2 million and $5 million, and large care groups as much as $20 million, said James Swanson, director of client services at Virtusa, an IT services and consulting company.

The new HHS rule is one of a series of changes required by the Affordable Care Act to cut red tape and save $6 billion over the next 10 years, according to HHS. The rule adopts the standard for a national unique health plan identifier (HPID) and a data element that will serve as an "other entity" identifier (OEID). An OEID is an identifier for entities that are not health plans, health care providers, or individuals, but that need to be identified in standard transactions, such as insurance companies.

"The most significant benefit of the HPID and the OEID is that they will increase standardization within the HIPAA standard transactions," HHS stated.