ICD-10 Migration: Everyone's Behind, But Does It Matter?

Yet another survey of healthcare providers finds most are behind on their ICD-10 conversion projects.

The most recent, by Health Revenue Assurance Holdings Inc., a back-office vendor for healthcare providers, surveyed 120 small and medium hospitals and found half are behind the recommended timeline for migrating to ICD-10.

The new survey correlates to findings by the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI), a consortium of health IT stakeholders formed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, that reported that more than 40 percent of all healthcare providers did not know when they would complete their impact assessment and business changes, and that half did not know when external testing of ICD-10 readiness would begin.

Health Revenue Assurance’s survey also found:

• 40 percent have not begun ICD-10 CM training for coding staff;
• 55 percent have not begun ICD-10-PCS training for coding staff;
• 47 percent have not begun document improvement education for medical staff.

As we now have several surveys that have found that a third to half of healthcare providers are lagging behind the recommended timelines for ICD-10 implementation, what we know is that it is not because they are unaware of either the deadline for ICD-10 adoption (Oct. 1, 2014) or of the suggested timeline milestones to accomplish this task. As ICD-10 adoption directly affects revenue generation by healthcare providers, we can assume that management of those organizations studied the risk, measured it, and from that assessment determined that they have enough time and resources to mitigate it.

The time has come to dispense with the Chicken Little surveys, and instead focus on the reasons providers choose to delay implementation. What do they know the rest do not?