ICD-10 Delay: Extra Time to Supercharge Your ICD-10 Knowledge

In a recent Physicians Practice blog entry by Marisa Torrieri¹, ICD-10 transition and implementation was noted as one of the biggest stressors for physicians. The blog entry discussed a survey given to 394 physicians and practice managers by an EHR vendor where 85% of the respondents ranked the transition to ICD-10 and 5010 as one of the top issues impacting their practices while noting that this also affects healthcare employees in the ambulatory arena in different ways.

Physicians fear that ICD-10 will reduce time spent with their patients as they will be more focused on utilizing the new coding system and coding to a very specific code rather than focusing on the patient themselves. Some fear that they may end up shortening the patient visit or seeing fewer patients in a day.

Practice managers on the other hand are stressed over productivity, increased workloads, training on the new coding system along with implementation and coordination of new technology.

Billing managers are concerned with how the new ICD-10 changes will affect the workflow of claims and reimbursement in general.

Customized superbills:

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) delayed the October 1, 2013 implementation of ICD-10 to a proposed October 1, 2014 ³ and this may give practices the much needed time and opportunity to actually get hands-on training and practice utilizing the new coding system. 

Few directions are provided on how to customize code sets to eliminate time spent searching through several thousands of codes a practice may never use. The key will be customizing your ICD-10 code sets and data itself. It is unlikely that you will be utilizing most of the approximately 68,000 diagnosis codes.  

You can customize your super bills to your specialty using ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM Diagnostic code mapping for specialties such as Anesthesia and Cardiology by utilizing Context⁴ Healthcare’s Linkage Libraries in CodeLink^® Pro. Create and build-a-bill (your super bill) to your specifications to provide real hands-on ICD-10 coding practice for you and your staff. CodeLink^® Pro will allow you see what your new ICD-10 codes will be for your specialty. Also, it will allow you to customize code notes or favorite most used codes to build-a-bill – your new super ICD-10 bill.

Transition challenges mitigated:

A recent ICD-10 survey performed by the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI), reported that one in five of the 2,597 providers surveyed were expected to complete ICD-10 readiness assessments with half of responding providers stating that they did not know when the assessments would be finished.² Health plan leaders reported that one in five of the 661 plan respondents indicated they had either not started or were less than one quarter of the way complete with their gap analysis. Only one in six of the 418 vendors participating in the survey had not even started preparing their products for the ICD-10 transition.

Let Context⁴ Healthcare show you how to make the transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 seamless and effortless with CodeLink® Pro. As a healthcare software vendor, we offer ICD-10 products tailored to your specialty such as build your own Super Bill allowing you and your staff hands on ICD-10 practice, ICD-9 to ICD-10 cross-walks and code search ability by key words or indexes.