Becker's ASC Review

86 ANTICIPATE CHANGE. WE DO. 636.273.6711 | www.nationalASCbilling.com The ASC Revenue Cycle. It's all we do. It's all we think about. And it shows. Hospital Review 150 Great Places to Work in Healthcare 2015 2 0 1 5 W ith less than one month to go until the Oct. 1 deadline, it's a race against the clock for U.S. healthcare providers to transition to the 10th version of the International Classification of Diseases. In the coming weeks, hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers will make final preparations for the coding switch, im- plementing last-minute updates to processes and systems and, in many cases, shoring up financial reserves to avoid cash flow disruptions. Troubleshooting, in particular, is expected to be a priority for providers in the days before the go- live date, as many facilities appear to have saved testing, technical fixes and upgrades for the 11th hour. According to an American Health Informa- tion Management Association provider survey released in June, while 81 percent of respondents planned to conduct end-to-end ICD-10 testing, as of early summer, only 50 percent of providers had actually conducted test transactions using ICD-10 codes with payers and clearinghouses. Even more, just 34 percent had conducted internal testing and 17 percent had completed external testing as of early summer 2015. As with all disciplines, practice makes perfect in revenue cycle management; the more time facilities spend testing and identifying areas for improvement, the fewer disruptions – cash flow and otherwise -- they can expect to see aer the deadline. e following best practices can help ASCs troubleshoot the most critical aspects of the revenue cycle ahead of the ICD-10 transition and avoid financial disruptions: Information technology Vendor delays appear to be at least partly to blame for the last-minute ICD-10 scramble this summer. In a March 2015 letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange wrote that about one-third of healthcare soware and services ven- dors it surveyed were still not ready for ICD-10 customer testing or usage. e health IT trade group also told regulators in the letter that one quarter of the vendors it interviewed indicated that updates would remain unavailable until at least the second quarter of 2015. For small providers and facilities, in particular, these ICD-10 soware update delays only height- en the importance of conducting rigorous testing and troubleshooting in the time remaining. Still, panic has yet to set in: In its June survey, AHIMA reported that only half of small providers had "performed technical system upgrades/updates to support ICD-10," while more than three-quarters of large organizations had done so as of early summer 2015. With limited time between now and Oct. 1, provid- ers should complete an inventory of every piece of soware utilized at their facilities, inquire with the appropriate vendors about ICD-10 updates, and deploy and test the releases as soon as possible. ICD-10 Troubleshooting: Ounce of Prevention Worth a Pound of Cure By Jessica Edmiston, National Medical Billing Services, senior vice president, performance review, BS, CPC, CASCC, AHIMA-approved ICD-10-CM trainer

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