Congress passed the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014, which both pushed back the implementation date for ICD-10 for another year and also preserved the pay rate for doctors treating Medicare patients.

Specifically, the ICD-10 coding revision is now slated for no earlier than October 1, 2015, despite intensive and costly preparations on the part of many hospitals, doctors’ offices and health information managers. The new law states that “the Secretary of Health and Human Services may not, prior to October 1, 2015, adopt ICD-10 code sets as the standards for code sets.” This means that ICD-10 can start any time after that date.

In addition, the new law also includes yet another temporary fix to the sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula, which was approved just hours before a scheduled 24% pay cut to physicians’ Medicare payments was due to take effect on April 1. Instead, the new law “patched” the SGR with a 0.5% increase in physicians’ Medicare payments until December 31, 2014. This is the 17th patch to the flawed SGR formula.

Global rates of blindness have fallen sharply over the past two decades, especially in wealthier nations where blindness dropped by half, according to a meta-analysis published online in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. Researchers analyzed 243 studies conducted in 190 countries and found that rates of blindness fell by 37% and poor vision by 27% from 1990 to 2010. The most common cause of poor vision remains uncorrected refractive error, easily corrected by a pair of eyeglasses.