To follow up with a survey conducted in June of 2013 which assessed various organizations on their ICD-10 readiness, today QualiTest released the results of a second, more recent survey on the topic. Conducted during November of 2013, this survey addressed how prepared the organizations are for the upcoming ICD-10 transition. Similarly, QualiTest queried over 300 upper-level healthcare industry professionals, mostly in IT positions throughout the organizations.

As the switch from ICD-9 to ICD-10 must be complete by October of 2015, the information which this survey gleaned can be instrumental to measuring how successful the transition will be. More than that, this second survey asked more questions about the revenue planning and CDI efforts these organizations are planning.

Main Findings:

  • The highest-ranking area which respondents said their testing should cover well was internal medical coder readiness testing, identified by 80% of responses. From there, equal importance was placed upon identifying internal CDI needs, internal functional testing to verify the technology stack, and external testing to verifying functional integration with key trading partners. Last by a very small margin was revenue impact testing with key external testing partners.
  • About a third of respondents reported that their organizations have begun ICD-10 testing and another third have completed the planning phase for their testing effort. The final percentage were either between their assessment and planning phases, or between identifying a support team/vendor and beginning their testing effort. This is a marked difference from June’s survey, which found that 75% of organizations had not yet begun ICD-10 testing.
  • Organizations which plan to acquire a tailored database of dual-coded medical records were most concerned with the utilization and verification of their own medical coders’ accuracy, though the additional costs were also a highly-rated concern. This is different from the previous survey, which reported that the acquisition of test data was a higher concern than the costs of this method.
  • More than two thirds of the respondents are planning to conduct revenue impact testing with their trade partners. The remainder indicated that they will not be performing revenue impact testing, either due to difficulties with their trade partners or because they think the revenue impact risk is low
  • Upwards of 60% of organizations are planning on testing with between 5 and 10 different healthcare payers.

For the complete ICD-10 migration survey results, please click here