Steff Deschenes

With the financial pressures that healthcare organizations are facing, many hospitals are using traditional cost cutting methods to save money by looking at layoffs and staff reductions. Many more hospitals, however, are finding ways to reduce costs through lean management methods that don't require layoffs and can improve quality for patients.

ICD-10's increased specificity has clear merits. As patients grow older, it's important that the details of their medical histories are stored somewhere other than in memory. But what are the negative implications of ICD-10's greatly expanded codeset?

Every second counts when you're working in a hospital operating room. Mark Antoszyk, head nurse anesthetist at Carolinas Medical Center NorthEast, was concerned that his hospital was wasting far too many of these seconds manually capturing charges for medication used.

There are plenty of unknowns concerning the financial aspects of ICD-10. Transitioning to the new codes could be a disaster for some providers. However, those who take into careful consideration their current clinical documentation and coding shortfalls and adjust them for ICD-10 specificity could see an entirely different outcome.

Telemedicine and mHealth have the potential to help the healthcare system meet the Institute of Healthcare Improvement's triple aim to simultaneously increase the quality of care, improve the health of populations and reduce the per capita cost of care.

As the ICD-10 transition looms closer, one of the greatest common problems healthcare facilities are going to face will lie with unpaid or inaccurate billing that could end up being quite costly for both the patient and the business itself.

As healthcare organizations prepare for the ICD-10 conversion, everyone knows there will be challenges. And while much of the focus has been on the difficulties of hands-on implementation, financial managers are not likely to make it through unscathed.

It's no secret that the broad adoption of electronic health record systems will bring about tremendous cost-savings once implemented. Repeat: once implemented. But before then? How does a healthcare organization avoid breaking the bank while trying to get to that lucrative promised land?