We recommend that you organize your planning into five steps for readiness.
1. Initiate, plan, and communicate
- Establish an ICD-10 team with a leader empowered to move the process along.
- Set a meeting frequency for the team—ideally, biweekly.
- Determine decision-making authority, including a reporting structure that fits within your organization (e.g., to an IT Steering Committee or Senior Management).
- Develop a detailed timeline, list of tasks, and anticipated effort.
- Educate leadership and key stakeholders on the impact and importance of ICD-10. This is not a flashy project like others you may be implementing; it will take effort to get the attention of leadership to understand its importance.
- Communicate the transition plan—and why ICD-10 matters—to the entire health system and outside partners/vendors/payers.
Complete discovery, inventory, assessment, and implement change
- Gather a preliminary list of applications, systems, and databases potentially impacted (including any quality reporting tools or legacy databases).
- Create an ICD-10 inventory and status tracker template to organize, track, and filter your progress towards compliance.
- Conduct discovery work sessions with all departments, vendors, and payers to determine readiness and identify risks for non-compliance.
- Update and maintain the inventory of areas with current ICD-10 readiness, including:
- Summary plan for ICD-10 compliance
- Specific dates when ICD-10 will be ready for testing
- A roster of impacted departments and people
- Anticipated training needs
- Identified risks
- Current status
- "Backup and contingency plans, especially if a vendor is not ready by 2014
- Execute your ICD-10 plans, upgrade software systems, modify databases, and prepare for testing and training.
3. Test and train
Develop a written testing plan and testing scenarios, including:
- Software testing (unit, system, performance, etc.)
- ICD-10 Level I compliance testing (internal testing)
- ICD-10 Level II compliance testing (external testing)
- Assess training needs and create written training plan.
4. Transition
- Go live with ICD-10 in accordance with the compliance date.
- Operate using ICD-10 coding system for all events moving forward.
- Utilize ICD-9 coding system for all events prior to the compliance deadline.
5.Monitor
Initiate your monitoring plan including monitoring for:
- Issues
- Productivity
- Accuracy
- Staffing levels and morale
- Quality
- Reimbursement
- Ongoing support needs and continued improvement
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.