Formalize Your Icd-10 Initiative!

The Time is Now to Formalize Your ICD-10 Initiative!

As you may know, the International Classification of Disease (ICD) is a set of codes used to report healthcare diagnoses and procedures created by the World Health Organization (WHO), currently used worldwide. The release of the 10th revision (ICD-10) by the WHO has been in use by other countries since 1994 and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) ruled in favor for a U.S. implementation date of October 1, 2013.

As the last industrialized country to adopt ICD-10, you may already appreciate the danger of not migrating to this new code set: most importantly, we will not have compatible data to compare internationally. As many other countries have already moved to ICD-10, the U.S. continues to capture morbidity data using the outdated classification system, ICD-9. This has already and will continue to lead to problems identifying and tracking new, global health threats.

Why Think About ICD-10 Implementation Now?

Although the United States mandated compliance date is not until October 1, 2013, in order to deploy a successful implementation of ICD- 10 and receive the best possible return on investment, now is the time to begin planning your implementation strategy. There are several specific reasons to begin your planning process today including:

*Changes to the coding sets will impact virtually every aspect of the business process and technology for all parties across the entire healthcare value chain.

*The extent of the impact of this change is projected to be as great as or greater than the implementation of the HIPAA standard transaction set implementation.

*Significant process assurance and technology testing will be required in advance of the deadline to ensure proper compliance.