Is your practice ready to transition to ICD-10?

Whether you are a large practice or a single physician practice, you and your staff need to prepare now to face ICD-10 head-on. With a little over two months to go before the implementation date, you could be panicking if you have (like many) hoped that ICD-10 would be postponed again. But there is yet enough time if you start working with your vendors, payers, service providers, and your staff today.

The areas that you need to immediately focus on include are your clinical documentation, billing and coding processes. Some of the key concepts of ICD-10 include greater specificity, added laterality, and increased complexity and changes in the way some major medical conditions are defined. Coders should have the knowledge specific to your specialty at this point. Physicians should know which additional elements need to be included in medical records. Unless healthcare providers start taking significant steps towards make these changes now, they cannot make a successful transition with minimal impact on revenues.

There are plenty of implementation resources available online on CMS, AHIMA, AAPC, and a myriad of other websites.