ICD-10: Gone are the Days

ICD-10—Potpourri:
General State of Readiness- How you can & should be Preparing for the Inevitable, Part 4 of 4

ICD-10 Heralds the Death of the Superbill 

 
This article goes into a bit more detail, but I think you can gather from the above discussions that a superbill just isn’t going to be super enough to cut it for ICD-10.  Gayl Kirkpatrick, from 3M HIS Consulting Services, gave an example from a hospital her team consulted with. "We took a two-page superbill in ICD-9 and translated that into ICD-10," Kirkpatrick said. "It became a 48-page superbill." (1)

ICD-10: Concerns & Preparations

ICD-10—Potpourri:
General State of Readiness- How you can & should be Preparing for the Inevitable, Part 3 of 4

“When healthcare transitioned to ICD-9 on Oct. 1, 1984, there was still great confusion 18 months later on how to submit the codes. There was great deal of frustration both on the provider side as well as the health plan side. There was also a huge lack of training to prepare the doctors for the transition to ICD-9. As a result, for almost a year, there were large drops in revenue.

I am seeing things now, for ICD-10, that I witnessed back then for ICD-9. A great deal of people have not even started their processes.” Ben Michelson, of Hayes Management Consulting ...(1.)

Why ICD-10?

ICD-10—Potpourri:
General State of Readiness- How you can & should be Preparing for the Inevitable, Part 2 of 4

This article “ICD-10 Implementation: Top concerns for healthcare providers” quotes Jim Jacobs, senior vice president and product management and health information management for QuadraMed. "If you want to understand outcomes and understand the protocols that are working, the protocols that have measured benefits, then you need quite a bit of specificity."

What is ICD-10?

ICD-10—Potpourri:
General State of Readiness & How you can (& should) be Preparing for the Inevitable, Part 1 of 4

The message is, as always, begin to prepare now and begin making the changes to how you document now, so that you are better prepared as a provider for ICD-10 and so your coders and billers will have the information they need to take care of you and the patients properly.

The International Classification of Diseases system will be updated from the ICD-9 to the ICD-10 standard on October 1, 2013.  These are the codes that are used in healthcare as a common language to describe the diagnosis, condition, or other reasons for a patient visit to the doctor or healthcare facility.  Now around the world ICD-10 has been used for years, the United States is one of the last places to implement this coding.