Strategies to Ease Your Home Health ICD 10 Transition

Coders may require as much as 80 hours of training to get ready. Break it down into these four phases.

The 2013 deadline for moving to the ICD-10 diagnosis codes set may seem a long way off, but the sooner you start preparing, the easier your transition will be. If you adopt the Boy Scout's "Be Prepared" motto, you might find yourself breathing a little easier.

Home health ICD 10 transition: Therese Rode, RHIT, HCS-D, Senior Coding Manager with INOVA VA Home Health in Springfield, Va warns the transition will call for a lot of preparation and training, but the real training can't be done too far out from the implementation date. She says that with training if you don't use it, you lose it. Here are four strategies that will smoothen your ICD-10 transition.

1. Form a planning committee

Rode says that in order to get the ball rolling, agencies should form a committee that includes everyone who touches coding.

Important: Bear in mind to include billing, quality assurance, and IT staff, and not just coders.

Anyone involved in coding or reimbursement should be part of the committee. The committee will make a decision on who should be the ICD-10 ringleader, what stages of the implementation will happen when, and which reports and forms need to be changed.

Bottom line: Gathering staff together will also help establish who requires what kind of training.

2. Calculate the costs of training

Agencies will have to keep money not just for training costs, but the make up for the loss of productivity while staff is training, reminds Rode. As per a study done by the Rand Corporation, health care employees who work with diagnosis and procedure codes will require 16 and 80 hours of training to prepare for ICD-10. Using an hourly rate of $31.25, Rand Corporation calculated that 16 hours of training will end up in $500 of lost productivity.

3. Find out the productivity impact of training.

Your clinical field staff will require training on ICD-10. You need to find out how this will affect productivity and how you will continue to provide care during the training, says Rode. Will you go for certified coders or temporary clinicians?

4. Practice with a dual system

Start running a dual system for claims submission six months before the date of ICD-10 implementation. Your actual claims and current reports will run through with ICD-9 codes, but a second test system will make use of ICD-10.

This will allow you to see where the glitches may take place, to see if Home Health Resource Group (HHRG) calculations are right, and to see what your payments convert to under the new system.

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Jan Mater-Cavagnero MA, HCS-D, specializes in diagnosis coding for homecarenews.inhealthcare.com home health agencies, as well as the wide variety of issues that impact the hospice industry. Jan is an editor-in-chief for Eli Healthcare, where she has written Home Health elihomecareconnection.com ICD-9 Alert for five years.