Tom Sullivan

Although HIPAA 5010 essentially serves as the EDI pre-cursor to ICD-10, the new transaction standard also brings a fistful of its own noteworthy advantages.

ICD-10 is but one piece of the healthcare puzzle with which IT shops and the CIOs who support them need concern themselves. The usual suspects include EHRs, Meaningful Use, healthcare reform, and the HITECH Act - and while simmering that acronym soup don't forget about RAC.

For those healthcare organizations that don't yet have a picture of the advantages ICD-10 will bring, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has outlined some of the most important ones.

When drawing up those ICD-10 strategies, healthcare organizations ought to be sure that “having enough coders” is on their priority list.

As many of the front-of-the-pack payers steer from ICD-10 assessment into remediation, they are finding the transition to be more challenging and even more resource-intensive than they thought. And that realization is forcing payers to take a more pragmatic – and less strategic – approach to the conversion.

Distant thunder rumbles across the HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 horizon. That's the sound of cloud computing services gliding toward healthcare organizations.

At a time when industry bodies and consultancies are trying to figure out how providers and payers can best transform existing ICD-9 data into the imminent ICD-10 code schemes, and the word “crosswalk” keeps being batted around, Dennis Winkler at Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan is the curious case of an ICD-10 crosswalk contrarian, believing he's found a better path. Winkler, it seems, just might be onto something that appears revolutionary but in practice is not.

What with many vendors and providers behind schedule on both HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10, Computer Sciences Corp. published a report offering advice on creating a balanced approach to migration and implementation. Here are three key questions to get providers started.

Some software vendors have not yet issued HIPAA 5010 enhancements, let alone those for ICD-10. What's more, providers and payers should already be gearing up for internal testing of HIPAA 5010 and at least beginning the ICD-10 implementation phase. So without the upgrades, what are providers and payers to do?

Want to advance your career and make your job more secure? Then think ICD-10 skills, and now.