There are couple of interesting articles on the state and the fate of ICD-10:
Here is one about the fate of the initiative. Emphasis is ours.
www.govhealthit.com:
A new Republican majority focused on curbing regulation may give the healthcare industry the opposite of what most are looking for: uncertainty. Or they could turn to a fairly simple option to help the stakeholders long resistant to ICD-10.
"ICD-10 will never happen, we'll just keep spending money on it."
So one health system CIO told a colleague at the College of Health Information Management Executives’ (CHIME) recent gathering, before the November elections ushered in a GOP majority in the House and Senate and raised new questions about the viability of ICD-10. (read full article)
And here is another one about the state of the affairs.
www.icd10monitor.com:
The Good:
ICD-10 consultants report that most health systems have been actively remediating their applications and IT systems. They have a thorough test strategy and test plan that includes utilizing dual-coded medical records and claims as a basis for their test scenarios and test scripts. Many are now working toward clinical, computer-assisted coding (CAC), and dual-coding go-live events while preparing to test with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Some have successfully completed integration testing with electronic health records (EHRs) or are currently in the process. They are right where they need to be in terms of timelines.
For small and large hospitals alike, unit and integration testing appears to be the easiest to perform, since these are often simple upgrades. Vendors often inform IT teams where changes were made and where codes are located. They also often provide test scripts, which allow for testing to be completed almost as quickly as the upgrade arrives.
Because they have developed test scripts to get as close to real workflows as possible, hospitals are later able to save time in confirming actual operations and processes with their end-users (“super users”) as they prepare for user acceptance testing (UAT).
Hospitals have also identified technologically savvy physicians to guide their peers, which seems to result in greater buy-in. These physician champions explain their role in ICD-10, what the expected ROI is for them (as well as for the healthcare community in general), ICD-10’s role in global health, and how to move towards clinical documentation improvement (CDI).
The Bad:
Consultants often are faced with a deficit of testing resources for key projects and overwhelmed leadership that can’t properly support those projects. Other major concerns include having numerous hospital IT systems and applications running with unknown or undocumented workflows, causing project delays and people/resource downtime.
Additionally, according to ICD-10 testing consultants, some big challenges for small and large hospitals include:
- Major changes involving new platforms or clinical systems
- Interfacing CDI/CACs with legacy systems
- Highly customized EHRs, which are taking longer for vendors to remediate and upgrade
- Not having an ICD-10 test strategy and test plan in place that have been well-communicated to the proper internal stakeholders before attempting testing
- Lack of test environment planning
- Not enough committed hospital SMEs allocated to the testing project
- No allocated/dedicated people, resources, space, time, etc.
- Limited or no access to IT systems
- Inappropriate test environments chosen
The Ugly:
Although there are few areas that fall into this category, ICD-10 testing consultants did emphasize the following factors that can negatively impact enterprise operations:
- Organizations being caught up in major systems upgrades with no awareness of testing requirements
- Lack of communication between consultants, PMOs, and organization decision-makers
- Lack of advanced testing preparations prior to launching testing efforts
- Lack of importance placed on regression testing (a critical step that is often skipped) (read full article)
Of course, the reality of life is such that the Good will go unnoticed, the Bad will be discussed, and the Ugly will go to the front pages of newspapers and news site. The question remains whether the industry has sufficiently tested the systems for readiness as opposite to workflow simulations. We will learn it in due course, of course only in the case that the transition will happen at all.
posted by: gqjournal
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