Healthcare organizations are not meeting the recommended milestones for implementation of ICD-10 codes, according to a new survey from the Workforce for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI).
By federal law, all physicians, hospitals, payers, clearinghouses and other entities covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) must transition from ICD-9 diagnosis and inpatient procedure codes to ICD-10 by Oct. 1, 2013.
Claims that don’t use the new codes for services provided on or after the deadline won’t be paid, according to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS has created recommended testing and implementation timelines to help the industry make the transition to the new codes, which provide better information about patient diagnoses and hospital procedures.
The WEDI survey found that two-thirds of health plans said they would not be ready for external testing of their ICD-10 systems by CMS’ recommended date of January 2013.
Also, three-quarters of healthcare providers said they would not be ready to test their systems by January 2013.
On a more positive note, software vendors who were surveyed said they were confident they could have ICD-10 products ready for customers in time to meet the compliance date. However, even as transition milestones loom, some vendors reported that customers have not turned their focus on ICD-10.
ICD-10 is much more complex than the 30-year-old ICD-9 code sets, which contained 17,000 codes. ICD-10 contains 155,000 codes.
“These results are showing that the industry is not progressing quickly enough on the timeline to assure us that they will be ready in October 2013,” said WEDI CEO/President Jim Schuping. “We would urge entities to increase their implementation effort or we will be facing and extremely difficult situation in 2013.”
The survey also reported that the industry is struggling to focus on ICD-10 implementation, given that the government also is requiring a new set of electronic healthcare transaction standards (Version 5010) to be implemented by Jan. 1, 2012.
As the healthcare industry moves to electronic recordkeeping, organizations looking to make a smooth transition can reduce paperwork headaches and focus on core business by outsourcing their back-office business processes. DATAMARK offers high-volume digital mailroom, transaction processing and document management services for large healthcare payers and providers. To learn more, visit our Healthcare Document Processing page.
No comments yet.