Edifecs presents educational session about HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 migration at HIMSS 2010

Edifecs, Inc., the proven leader in HIPAA 5010 and Healthcare Channel Modernization solutions, was invited to present an educational session about HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 migration by the HIMSS Medical Banking Project. The "first substantive session of the Medical Banking Boot Camp," as Healthcare Finance News described it in its report, was presented by Sunny Singh, CEO, Edifecs and Dr. Joe Nichols, Medical Director, Edifecs.

In his remarks about HIPAA 5010 compliance, Singh highlighted strategies, including complete replacement, remediation and step-up / step-down strategies available to healthcare organizations in transitioning from HIPAA 4010A1 to 5010. In addition, Singh spoke about the various testing options – such as internal testing, external testing, end-to-end testing and collaborative testing – that healthcare organizations could adopt on the path to HIPAA 5010 compliance.

"While HIPAA 5010 impacts a finite set of IT systems, it's risky to minimize the complexity of the transition," said Singh. "The only way to mitigate the 5010 migration risks is to plan carefully and to develop testing strategies that touch multiple scenarios and systems – both internal as well as external."

Dr. Joe Nichols pointed out that even though the ICD-10 compliance deadline of Oct 1, 2013 appeared fairly distant, the implications and impacts represented by ICD-10 are enormous and planning must start now. He compared the ICD-10 impact to that of Y2K, where complexity arose from the sheer pervasiveness of the legacy code. In his presentation, Nichols highlighted the scope and complexity of the ICD-10 transition, and discussed why ICD-10 was a critical transition for the healthcare industry, both for its far-reaching impacts and benefits.

"While translation is an important part of the solution and the industry is justifiably discussing 'crosswalks,' only five percent of the ICD-10 codes map directly to ICD-9 codes and only 26% of the ICD-9 codes map directly to ICD-10 codes," said Nichols. "Developing an effective translation strategy is considerably more involved than a simple one-to-one mapping of codes."

The session was concluded with recommendations from the Edifecs team to start 5010 projects right away, to start defining ICD-10 plans very quickly and to work closely with vendors and trading partners while planning and executing 5010 and ICD-10 projects.