A week from Saturday we will be holding our one-day only ICD-10 implementation conference. We still have some seats available. This conference will be held in the Renaissance Dallas Hotel on February 22 beginning at 8:30am. If you have not made concrete plans about how to implement ICD-10 in your practice I urge you to make those plans now! You don't have to come to this conference, but you better find some educational conference/seminar to go to and get started now. You can register for the live conference here or if you can't make it, the audio/video seminar will be shipping by March 3rd and you can sign up for it here.
So what is this conference about? First off, it is NOT a training course in ICD-10. Those courses are available for free and really it's too early to learn them right now anyways. Our course WILL discuss how to find the free training. Our course will discuss when you should train your personnel and about how long it will take to get all the training done based on the type of job they are doing.
We will go in depth to help you chart out an actual calendar of events that needs to happen from now until October 1, 2014. Starting with Task #1 Forming Committees and ending with the Final Task: ICD-10 Completion Party because by October 1 you will have finished your work.
We will go through issues with budgeting. Not just money but also more importantly budgeting time and staff. We will walk through the computer/IT mess and make sure your software/hardware is on track to being up-to-date in plenty of time to make everything happen smoothly. Everything from Contracts to Business Processes will be covered and every item in your office will be 'mapped out' and ensure a smooth implementation.
We will also spend a significant amount of time ensuring Clinical Systems are in place. This is to make sure our Coding and Documentation matches our new level of ICD specificity. We've been so worried in the past about making sure we've satisfied the requirements for a 99214 (detailed History, detailed Exam, Moderate level of Decision Making). Did you know that it is estimated that 65% of charts do not support the specificity required in ICD-10? For example, if you code a patient that has "moderate persistent asthma with acute exacerbation" (J45.41) you now have several things to defend in an audit. Your note must show they have an acute exacerbation. But it must also show they have moderate persistent asthma. If it doesn't, and you get audited, and it is determined that you don't have enough information to support the diagnosis code you used, then the whole visit could get thrown out. We will spend time talking about ways to help audit-protect our charts in this conference.
Last week I gave a 1-hour teleconference to about 50 medical offices giving an introduction to ICD-10. If you are unclear about what ICD-10 is, I urge you to watch the following videos:
Note that these videos are just an introduction to ICD-10. The conference we are holding on the 22nd is not the same as the videos-the conference attendees will leave equipped with concrete plans and information including a timeline of exactly how to implement ICD-10 in their office. As part of your purchase price of the live conference or the videos, you can also enroll in our Email Alerts. These alerts will coincide with the timeline dates and give you simple reminders of the tasks that should be completed, being scheduled, or planned.
I look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks in Dallas. Right now will still have plenty of space but seating is limited and filling up fast. Ideally you should send at least 2 people from your practice: The practice manager and the "other" person in the office who is most responsible and can get things done. Often neither one of these people are the physician (sorry docs). Of course, the doctors are invited too. But physicians listen up! Don't make the mistake of thinking you have the time or desire to do all the things needed to get ICD-10 implementation done in your practice. I am a physician. I know you! The AMA did a study estimating that it will cost approximately $40,000 per doctor to implement ICD-10. This includes real costs and lost wages spent in time training as well as other ways. I think that is a ridiculous sum. However, don't fool yourself into thinking that you will 'make it all happen' unless you plan to spend an average of 3-4 hours per week over the next 6 months to oversee this process. You won't. So put one of your valuable, responsible, trustworthy employees in charge of this process and I hope to see them next week at the conference! Of course you're invited as well. But, like me, you need to spend your time seeing patients (your strong point) and have other people in your practice overseeing this other stuff (their strong points).