For The Record | HCCS Assesses Early ICD-10 Returns

By James Cronin

With only a few exceptions, the first few weeks of October 2015 have been pretty uneventful across the 100+ hospitals and health systems that outsource their coding to us. As will be the case with any other organization that has adequately prepared their coders, dual coding was a greater drain on resources than coding only ICD-10. For us, the most exciting ICD-10 issue of week one concerns encoders not being calibrated correctly, causing either ICD-10 or ICD-9 codes to not be accepted. The most common fix for this is a workaround that has a productivity hit similar to that of dual coding. Other than the noncritical IT issues, it’s been eerily quiet. For instance, we were asked to set up two ICD-10 hotlines that cover about 80 hospitals, and we have received less than 10 calls. More…