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Where do healthcare organizations stand in regards to meeting this deadline?
KPMG conducted a survey to determine the answer to this question, and found that more than 1/3 of respondents are unsure if they will even start testing with external entities; if they will complete end-to-end testing; or if they will implement user acceptance testing. For more about KPMG’s study, go here.
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Another report, from The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange, states that 80% of healthcare providers will not be ready for the Oct. 1, 2014 deadline.
On the positive side, more than 3/4 of respondents indicated they completed an impact assessment, which is the first step in moving towards ICD-10 compliance. Also, 1/3 of respondents are already completing testing – external, end-to-end, and even user compliance. That still leaves 1/3 of respondents of which only slightly more than 80% are planning to do so, but have not yet started testing. Some respondents, 3% to be exact, stated they do not plan on engaging in end-to-end testing at all.
Of course, there is always a margin of error in these type of surveys. KPMG’s survey was based on questions posed during online informational sessions. The exact number of participants would have fluctuated for each question due to the way they were asked. This has the potential to mean that only a handful of people responded to any given question. In addition, those who answered, they did not know, or they certainly would not be, implementing testing may simply lack the resources to do so. Even so, these few numbers highlight how much of the healthcare industry is not yet even beginning to prepare for ICD-10 deadlines.
So now what?
It is still possible to meet the deadline, even if an implementation plan has not yet been started. The longer any healthcare organization waits to start their implementation plan, the less likely that they will be able to meet this October 1 deadline. The first step to making this happen needs to start with a quality impact assessment. Without an assessment, an organization cannot be ready for testing.
A big part of end-to-end testing, which is very important to ensure that any health organization will not have major problems when the October deadline arrives, is testing with vendors. Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced it is now going to be providing a testing week with their local Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) for acknowledgement testing the week of March 3-7, 2014. In addition, they will be conducting limited end-to-end testing with selected providers sometime during the summer. For more information please see this CEDI website and this InformationWeek report.
According to Tom Sullivan, an editor for Government Health IT, Wayne Cafran, KPMG’s advisory principal for healthcare and life sciences, has been quoted saying, to meet that deadline at this point, any health organization would need “a flawless execution of your implementation strategy — and that needs to happen now.”
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