Dec 15 2009
Foresight Corporation’s Chief Technology Officer Ed Hafner testified
Thursday, December 10, before the National Committee on Vital and Health
Statistics (NCVHS) Subcommittee on Standards, providing insights and
recommendations to help the industry prepare for the upcoming transition
to the ASC X12 5010 transaction standard and ICD-10 code sets, as
mandated by HIPAA.
Hafner presented his testimony in conjunction with Jerry C. Connors,
President of the Data Interchange Standards Association (DISA). Both
referred to the benefit of independent certification of 5010 readiness
using a service such as the DISAcertSM
5010 certification service, operated by DISA, which facilitates
thorough testing through automated detection of complex use-case
scenarios.
In his remarks, Hafner, who is also a member of the Board of Directors
of the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) and co-chair of
several of the group’s committees, addressed testing, certification, and
collaboration in preparation for the 5010 and ICD-10 transition. Among
his recommendations:
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Testing collaboration through regional communities and through
hub-and-spoke (payer-and-provider) relationships should be encouraged.
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Healthcare organizations should be encouraged to use a certification
service that tests not only front- and back-end applications, but
ensures full system readiness through robust scenario testing.
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Payers and providers should assert market-pressure on software and
services vendors to deliver 5010-ready products earlier than December,
2010.
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Organizations should begin their Level II planning by mid-2010, and
anticipate Level II tests for inclusion in Level I internal testing.
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Pilot migrations should be encouraged to identify and apply best
practices into the general migration process.
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ICD-9 to ICD-10 Crosswalk tables should only be used to convert
historical data, and not for ongoing production, otherwise the
benefits of coding specificity for detailed reporting would be lost.
Source Foresight Corporation