Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 11/10/14

Assuming that it doesn’t get delayed yet again, ICD-10 is a little less than 11 months away. For those of us who had been preparing for the most recent and now-postponed transition date, it’s time to dust off our implementation and training plans if we haven’t done so already.

My organization had already done a fair amount of informational outreach to physicians and other providers, so most people know what it is and that eventually they will have to use it. Their actually readiness to do so, however, is variable.

I have to admit that I’m not well versed on our plans for the transition in the hospitals. As our employed physician base has grown, I’ve had to focus more and more of my time on the ambulatory projects. Although I’m still privileged for inpatient medicine, I rarely see patients in that environment.

Even so, the communication from our hospital to rank-and-file admitters has been spotty at best. I think I’ve seen maybe a handful of emails since the last delay. Hopefully they will get on their game soon at least as far as communicating with community providers is concerned.

On the ambulatory front, however, we’re really gearing up. We’ve been on the ICD-10 ready version of our EHR and practice management software for a year. It was helpful that they bundled the ICD-10 functionality in with the 2014 Meaningful Use Stage 2 content so we didn’t have to take multiple upgrades.

Now that they’ve had a little bit of a hiatus with regulatory requirements, our vendor has again turned to coding actual functionality and usability updates, which puts me in the lane again for an upgrade prior to ICD-10.

Timing the need to educate everyone around an upgrade is tricky with ICD-10. We do plan to bring all the ambulatory end users in for some type of formal training for both processes and don’t want them too close together (training fatigue) or too far away from the go-live dates. We also have to remain sensitive to the realities of pulling people out of office.

Although I wrote a few weeks ago that we’re doing computer-based modules for new practice go-lives and for addition of incremental staff, we’re still planning to do classroom training for these two projects. We’ll likely supplement them with on-demand resources as well, but right now I’m planning for traditional training.

We did purchase some external vendor content for ICD-10 for certain high-dollar and complex subspecialties, but I’m responsible for organizing the plan for medicine-based subspecialties and primary care. We had external trainers in last year to train our core team (physician leaders, compliance officers, auditors, training staff, etc.) but I’m sure most of us have forgotten the nuances. We’re going to have them back after the first of the year to deliver a refresher.

In addition to the classroom training planned for closer to October 1, we’re scheduling monthly lunch and learn sessions to re-familiarize people with the concepts of ICD-10 and prepare them for more intense documentation. During the decade we’ve been on EHR, many of our providers have developed an affinity for voice recognition-based narrative documentation. Since they’re not using the discrete elements of the EHR as much as they used to, their ability to leverage discrete data to suggest appropriate ICD codes will be limited.

We anticipate that those who are afraid of learning a new coding system may want to rely more heavily on the EHR’s computer-assisted coding features, which will require retraining on the template-based workflows for those providers. Being able to identify those individuals early will be good, especially since we didn’t exactly budget for basic EHR retraining as part of our ICD-10 transition. I’m hoping we can leverage super users in the practices and our regional physician champions to assist, but I want to make sure all the bases are covered.

Although some of our providers complain about the restrictions of being employed, ICD-10 is a prime example of why physicians are willing to give up a degree of autonomy in exchange for corporate management structures. I’m working with two other people to put together our strategy and it will be rolled out to all of our practices. If those sites were independent, they’d be on their own to find a consultant, develop a program, or potentially try to just wing it.

Of course, those organizations that aren’t even on their ICD-10 ready software yet have additional work cut out for them. I don’t envy the upcoming months for them. With the estimated cost of the transition ranging from $50K for small practices to millions of dollars for the rest of us, there’s a lot at stake.

Are you ready for ICD-10? What’s your strategy? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.