Lucky for us in Malaysia, our hospitals with EMR systems with technology already incorporating the ICD-10 code set, are not up against paying the high price of implementing ICD-10 unlike in the US where hospitals using EMR/EHR systems are gearing up for the October 2013 ICD-10 dateline (which is likely to be delayed again to October 2014).
One example of an US hospital system that encompasses 14 hospitals, is the North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System, N.Y. They estimate the price tag will be about US$50 million (about RM158 million) including project management, I.T. remediation(some 90 applications), training and other areas.
Sutter Health which runs 24 hospitals across northern California, is another example which provided an even higher price tag–well over $100 million (about RM316 million), including $60 million (about RM190 million) for technology remediation (some 146 applications will need to be remediated) and $25 million (about RM79 million) for a computer-assisted coding program
Both these organizations are said to well ahead of the rest of the industry in their ICD-10 planning in the US. However, they are being cautious and concerned with long-term financial impact on their revenue when converting past billing claims to ICD-10 and also estimating where documentation would need to be enhanced to support the more granular codes in ICD-10.
In the US, ICD-9 codes have been used mainly for billing, historically. It seems every clinical encounter that gets billed to an insurance payor includes diagnosis designations, encoded as ICD-9 codes.
Thus, I can understand the profound impact of paying the high price of implementing ICD-10 in the US when changing the fundamental method of encoding diagnoses to a whole new system .
The rationale for making such a change (given the disruption that will occur) is that the ICD-10 code set is more detailed and extensible, allowing for more than 155,000 different codes, and permits the tracking of many new diagnoses and procedures (a significant expansion on the 17,000 codes available in ICD-9).
As we know ICD-10 was developed by the WHO and released in 1992, soon after the ICD-10 system was adopted relatively swiftly in most of the world including in Malaysia.
Abridged, from the article The High Price of ICD-10 by Gary Baldwin, June 26, 2012, Health Data Management reporting from the HFMA conference June 24-27 2012 in Las Vegas, where panelists shared the above estimates.
With additional references from:
practicefusion.com/, Website
ehrscope.com, Blog
pdmanesthesia.com/, Blog for the image in this post
