What with many healthcare entities already so far behind on both HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 implementations as to render industry timelines almost worthless, WEDI and NCHICA reworked their recommendation.
The new timeline, according to the groups, outlines what potential problems delaying ICD-10 progress can create for providers, plans, and vendors, including increased failure risks. "For those entities that have delayed work later than the August 2010 date, critical steps are even more drastically impacted," the groups explained.
The earlier WEDI and NCHICA timeline was built on the advice that healthcare organizations begin ICD-10 work in January 2009, something very few actually did. Instead, despite the existing guidelines and recommendations issued by WEDI, as well as the raft of consultancies and analyst firms, thus far providers, payers, and vendors have made precious little progress toward HIPAA 5010, to say nothing of ICD-10 and many of those organizations that have begun are finding the transition more difficult and resource-intensive than their original assessment's indicated.
All the while, CMS (The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) stands firm on October 1, 2013 as the deadline by which all healthcare organizations must comply with ICD-10. HIPAA 5010, the EDI pre-cursor to ICD-10, is mandated for January 1, 2012.
WEDI and NCHICA explained that the updated timeline includes several steps either combined or condensed such that months were essentially lopped off so that healthcare organizations will be able to meet the deadlines.
The groups, however, are not suggesting that everyone switch to the new timeline. Rather, "individual entities should look at both the original timeline and the alternative timeline to determine which best reflects their situation and use that as the starting point for their project plan."
WEDI CEO Jim Schuping said in a statement that the organizations "will continue to monitor industry progress on this critically important initiative."
The updated timeline is available at:
http://www.nchica.org/HIPAAResources/Timeline/TimelineUpdate.pdf.
This story originally appeared in ICD10Watch and can be found here.