We are merely 268 days away (… again) from the October 1, 2015 implementation date of ICD-10. As we roll (… literally) out of the holiday season and into a new year, we hope everyone is refreshed, replenished, and ready to tackle the many challenges and opportunities that continue to face the ICD-10 project, NYP, and the healthcare industry. However, in case you’re not, ICD-10 has you covered with T73.3.xxS (holiday exhaustion).

December brought us good news, relatively speaking, from our friends in the federal government. Despite the minority’s best intentions, critics of ICD-10 were unsuccessful in getting any legislative provisions further delaying ICD-10 included in the most recent Omnibus spending bill. This clears the path for next three months when we will look to another attempt to couple another delay with the sustainable growth rate formula for physician payments as was accomplished last year.

January will provide the ICD-10 project with some major accomplishments and set the stage to begin our final readiness activities.

• Operationalize a dual coding production environment. NYP will look to expand its dual coding activities to additional service lines, payers, and personnel giving us a larger and more representative spectrum of our patient population for analysis and remediation. We will also make our dual coding environment available to our NYPHS sponsored hospitals, NY Methodist and NY Hospital Queens.
• Complete end-to-end claims testing with payers. During the last week of January, NYP will submit a small sample of claims to National Government Services (NGS), our Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC), as part of the CMS’ end-to-end claims testing activities. Unlike their recently released acknowledgment testing results, end-to-end testing will actually process our claims and return remittance information. This provides NYP with assurances that not only can one of our largest payers receive ICD-10 coded claims but can accurately pay them as well.

Other activities will continue to progress and expand under the assumption that no further delays shall occur. For a complete overview of the project status, click here to view the Project Scorecard.

Should you have questions about what you can be doing to get your department ready for ICD-10 or would like to request an in person presentation from the ICD-10 project team, please e-mail ICD10Help@nyp.org.

Happy New Year and welcome back!