How to Prepare For ICD-10 The Right Way

If you’ve done any reading about ICD-10, you know that this transition will be a monumental task. Fundamentally speaking, ICD-10 is a paradigm shift. It is designed to completely transform medical documentation. And since documentation is a lot of what doctors do, inevitably these changes will impact our day-to-day practice. In a recent AMA publication, the authors concluded that the two biggest challenges with implementing ICD-10 will be having the necessary system upgrades completed and staff training. Preparing and planning ahead on how to manage these two main areas of concerns will greatly decide how smoothly the practice will transition to coding in an ICD-10 world. However, addressing system upgrades and staff training are mainly operation and implementation issues. There is one important piece of the preparations that is not getting enough mention. And that is, the potential cash flow issues that can occur during this transition. In other words, will your practice have enough cash reserve to sustain 2, 3 or 6 months without any income? I can’t speak for other specialties, but in pediatrics, when we’ve gone through CPT updates and revisions, health insurance company can take weeks, sometimes months before they update their systems despite being informed of the new codes months in advance. With ICD-10 we are talking about a complete overhaul of our entire CPT system. Can we be assured that health insurance company will have all these codes ready in t...
Source: Pediatric Inc - Category: Pediatricians Authors: Tags: Practice Management Revenue The Business of Medicine Time Management Cash ICD-10 Line of credit Cash Flow Money Planning Transition Source Type: blogs