Though ICD-10 will likely become the standard on Oct. 1, healthcare providers are planning on filing dual claims for some time after the changeover.
For outpatients who receive care on both Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, the challenge will billing under both ICD-9 and ICD-10 diagnostic coding vocabularies, according to providers who spoke Wednesday during an ICD-10 readiness session at MedAsset’s Healthcare Business Summit in Las Vegas.
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Inpatients, on the other hand, will be billed according to discharge date, said Denise Ryan, vice president of AR Services for MedAssets.
“It’s definitely going to be difficult,” said Marvin McLanahan, executive director of Revenue Cycle for Hackensack UMC Mountainside in New Jersey. “Are you ready to accommodate two versions of codes?”
For some, the answer was “not really.”
Kirby Hedrick, patient accounts director for Maury Regional Medical Center in Columbia, Tennessee, said the system had a dual billing system in which they have set two different dates for ICD-10 and ICD-9
Providers without a dual billing systems will also have to send bills through the scrubber for editing and then “crosswalk” them back to ICD-9, said Angela Brown, vice president of client strategy for MedAssets.
[Also: ICD-10 passes end-to-end testing]
Fitting in testing of the new system while getting the daily job done also presents a challenge.
Those relying on existing staff are struggling, said McLanahan. While those who will do the best have partnered with a consultant or vendor, he said. MedAssets does not do that work, he said.
“If you don’t have a partner now, you’re pretty much in trouble,” he said.
Others in the group of about 100 people at the event said they were concerned about physicians taking on more coding duties, as ICD-10 will increase the number of codes by an estimated 50,000.
Twitter: @SusanMorseHFN