Warning: ICD-10 Could Impact Unexpected Systems

By Ken Congdon, editor in chief, Health IT Outcomes

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The year-long extension HHS (Department of Health and Human Services) has granted for ICD-10 compliance gives all healthcare providers extra time to get their ducks in a row for the diagnostic/procedure code set transition. Health leaders would be wise to use this time to ensure they have thoroughly evaluated the impact the switch to ICD-10 will have on all other hospital systems. This is the advice Fletcher Lance, national healthcare leader at North Highland, a consulting firm with experience driving ICD-10 and Meaningful Use initiatives for health systems, hospitals, and hospital corporations, provided me in a recent one-on-one interview. Lance cautions that it can be easy for a hospital to overlook systems and applications that will be affected by a transition to ICD-10 because they aren’t directly linked to the implementation.

“Most providers focus their attention on the HIM (health information management) system during an ICD-10 transition,” says Lance. “HIM definitely bears the brunt of the impact, but several other systems can also be affected during an ICD-10 implementation. In fact, in a recent ICD-10 assessment we performed for a large IDN (integrated delivery network), we identified more than 20 subsystems that would be impacted by the transition. These subsystems included everything from EHR and e-prescription applications to patient registration systems.”

Below is a complete list of the existing systems North Highland identified that would be impacted by the IDN’s shift to ICD-10:

1. McKesson’s Horizon suite of applications (EHR)
2. McKesson’s Supply Scan (purchasing/invesntory management)
3. MedAssets Avega Decision Support
4. MedAssets XactiMed (claims management)
5. 3M Health Information Systems
6. Allscripts Discharge Manager
7. Emdeon Assistant (patient registration/eligibility/verification)
8. Endotool (hospital glucose monitoring system)
9. Nuance Dragon 36/eScription (speech recognition/dictation)
10. GE Centricity Perinatal (perinatal EHR/clinical information system)
11. GE Muse (cardiology information system)
12. Impath/Elekta Cancer Registry Software
13. LMRPManager (Medicare management software)
14. MediMobile (mobile charge and data capture solution)
15. MIDAS+ (purchasing/benchmarking/case management)
16. Philips VISICU (remote monitoring/clinical intelligence)
17. EMC PowerPath (data path optimization/load balancing)
18. Siemens RapidComm ( blood gas/urine/point-of-care testing)
19. Zoll’s RescueNet Billing System
20. TheraDoc (clinical decision support software)
21. Homegrown enterprise data warehouse applications

Would all of these systems be on your ICD-10 preparation checklist?