HighPoint Solutions launches ICD-10 Appliance for healthcare systems

HighPoint Solutions announced today the launch of its ICD-10 Appliance, a master data solution that helps hospitals, healthcare systems, and payers with ICD-10 compliance. The ICD-10 Appliance employs master data management principles and tools to create a central business management layer with ICD-9/ICD-10 mappings, translations, and business rules that can be utilized by all applications.

The ICD-10 Appliance addresses four key challenges confronting healthcare organizations' remediation initiatives. First, most of these firms are looking to their vendors to remediate core systems, but each vendor will take a different approach, causing inconsistencies in business rules. Second organizations need a solution that allows them to define and allow overrides and exceptions to the standard mappings for specific trading partners and business functions (which cannot be done with crosswalks). Third, obtaining meaningful trends and analytics poses a significant hurdle when firms must reconcile historical ICD-9 data, recent data in both ICD-9 and ICD-10, and future ICD-10 data. Finally, since firms are also coping with remediation for HIPAA 5010 and healthcare reform, time and cost pressures will make full remediation impossible.

"Chaos will ensue if payers and providers let their vendors create separate mappings and rules for each application. The key is to utilize a master data solution to create a single business process management layer with centralized rules, mappings, and translations that can be applied uniformly to all applications," said John Wollman, Executive Vice President of Healthcare.

HighPoint Solutions teamed with Siperian, a leading provider of master data management software, to develop the ICD-10 Appliance. The Appliance serves as a centralized point for disease and procedure master data and is pre-populated with ICD-9 and ICD-10 CM, PCS codes, GEMS, and Reimbursement mappings.

The ICD-10 Appliance delivers several key benefits. It enables selective remediation without sacrificing compliance or analytic excellence.  It applies business rules uniformly across all processes and applications.  The appliance facilitates consistency in approach and rules when major commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications are sourced from multiple vendors and integrated with internally-developed applications.  While the Appliance supports standard mappings, it also permits overrides or extensions based on customer, business process, or function.  Finally, it can be easily updated with future changes in mappings (e.g. ICD-11) or additional value-added mappings (e.g. ICD-10-CM for disease codes to ICD-10-PCS for procedure codes)

"The deadline for compliance may seem distant, but with diagnosis and procedures codes in virtually every aspect of business operations, payers and providers are running short on time," said Wollman.  

The HighPoint ICD-10 Appliance is not a panacea.  It will still require work, but less work than upgrading each application individually.  When thinking about remediating every application and the associated time and dollars, the question of ROI must be raised.  "The appliance gives you a longer runway to determine the ROI by allowing you to see data come in and build a knowledge base over time that enables you to make more informed decision," said Wollman.