The conversion to ICD-10 will be of a larger scale (just from the IT perspective – not including all the retraining of medical coders and other business changes) than the Y2K conversion. With Y2K, we just had to find those 2 digit year fields and change them to 4 digits. In addition to expanding the length of diagnosis and procedure code fields – there are all the system changes to support new business rules and changes to processes.
If you’re not sufficiently concerned about being able to perform a thorough Impact Analysis (enabled by effective enterprise meta data repositories with integrated meta data across many meta data subject areas) this should serve as a shot across the bow – “On the payer side, UnitedHealth Group has inventoried over 700 systems affected by ICD-10, including “claims platforms, processing applications and decision support tools,” says Ross Lippincott, vice president, 5010 and ICD-10 programs.” Health Information Management http://bit.ly/vTIitl
IT organizations should take advantage of funding made available for ICD-10 conversions to make architectural changes which will allow IT to change its systems more rapidly – as the pace of change is not going to slow down. Implementing an enterprise meta data repository is a solid investment which will pay dividiends well beyond the ICD-10 conversion.
