As I write this, we are 102 days, 13 hours, 56 minutes and 38, 37, 36… seconds away from ICD-10.  I’ve told several audiences this week that I think we should make the CMS countdown the screensaver for our providers’ computers.  Because of recent proposed legislation, I am becoming concerned that the urgency to be ready is waning.  If ICD-10 is not delayed – and according to most industry leaders, it will most likely not be delayed – I fear some will not be ready.  The tide is coming in and we must prepare for it.

Having said that, if you are not ready, there are some things that you can do right now to be more ready than you are today.  You can go on to the CMS website and do some reading about the new code set.  CMS has a tool called Road to 10 that leads to specialty references – a place to view the codes that pertain to your particular specialty, tips for clinical documentation improvement, scenarios and more.  There are trainings for providers that offer CMEs.  There are webcasts, quick references, templates and even implementation guides.  Bottom line, there is no excuse.

If you are a coder, it is your duty to help your provider be ready.  One of the things that you can do is to crosswalk your high volume diagnoses using AAPC’s code translator.   Simply run a report from your practice management software and identify the codes that you use most often.  On October 1st, providers will be seeing the same conditions that they see on September 30th; the codes will just be very different.  If you simply stop there you are doing your provider no favors.  In fact, it will hurt their reporting.  Many of the codes that providers currently use are nonspecific.  If we simply crosswalk the nonspecific codes to ICD-10-CM, they become even more nonspecific and often fall to the bottom of categories.  We need to take the crosswalk a step further; we need to show them the entire category for the crosswalked code.  We need to show them the structure and language of the code set that they will use every day.  Copy the entire category into your crosswalk in an Excel spreadsheet and then highlight the words that differentiate one code from another.  And I think we need to go one step further.  We need to show them the instructional notes that they do not see when they choose codes in their EMR.  Most EMRs do not have the conventions and instructions of the code set built into the code lookups so providers are coding blind.  They don’t know when they should “code first” or when they should “use additional code.”  By doing your crosswalk in this way, you will show the providers the code choices and the instructional notes that lead to correct coding, coding that is both accurate and complete.

Sometimes providers will tell me that transitioning to ICD-10 is just an IT solution.  It is so much more than that.  It’s just a fact that if providers are unaware of the importance of this transition, and are not diligent in their efforts to be ready, it will impact their reimbursement.

Opportunity often comes knocking disguised as challenge.  It is this challenge of ICD-10 that becomes a wonderful opportunity for coders to demonstrate their value in healthcare, to be the subject matter experts here, to help providers be ready on October 1st (barring an act of Congress) and to make a difference in the bottom line.  The tide is coming in.  Are you ready?