When it comes to ICD-10, most folks in health care have other priorities

by: Laura Evans Apr 15, 2013

If you haven’t gotten going on the ICD-10 transition thing, you are far from alone – a high percentage of health care providers, including physicians and hospitals, haven’t gotten much further this year than they were in February 2012 and many aren’t sure when they’ll get around to conducting their ICD-10 impact assessments, says a new survey from the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI).

“Based on the survey results, it is clear the industry is not making the amount of progress that is needed for a smooth transition,” WEDI chairman Jim Daley concludes in a comment letter to CMS.

It didn’t help that CMS postponed the effective date a year to Oct. 1, 2014; many survey respondents said that prompted them to focus on other priorities and regulatory mandates, such as electronic health record meaningful use requirements, Daley says.

If you figured you don’t need to worry about ICD-10 because your software vendor will take care of everything, better figure again; the WEDI survey shows that vendors haven’t made much more progress on conversion to the new code set since February 2012. “About half the vendors indicate they are half or less than halfway complete with product development.”

That raises the question of how the rest of the vendors are doing – better check with yours. You can read about what questions to ask your vendor to get real answers about their readiness in an upcoming issue of Part B News.

Payers are “moderately” further along than last year, WEDI reports. “Almost half the health plans have completed their assessment, and another quarter are nearly complete,” Daley states.

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