Home Health & Hospice Week

A working budget should encompass every aspect of planning, including productivity training.

You may have put ICD-10 planning on the back burner once CMS delayed the implementation date by a year, but keep in mind that 2014 really is just around the corner, so the time to prepare is now.

Home care providers can benefit from tips offered during an Oct. 25 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services National Provider Call, "Prepar-ing Physicians for ICD-10 Implementation."

"Education and patience are key," said Gin-ger Boyle during the call. Boyle is a practicing family physician who has developed a coding education program for her hospital and its family practice residency program. Her presentation broke down the ICD-10 transition into the following six phases:

In other words: To begin, you should estab-lish the project structure, responsible parties, and highlight clinician and coding champions who can be assets. You should also create your budget. Be sure to include software upgrades, training needs, and productivity loss/gain.

Then, talk to all those involved, which may include office administrators, vendors, providers, clearinghouses, payers, and other associates.

You need to monitor the impact on the following aspects: personnel, claims, reimbursement, denials, and rejections.

Bottom line: "Once you create a timeline, you need to stick to it," Boyle urged listeners. CMS finalized the ICD-10 compliance date of Oct. 1, 2014, as stated in the Sept. 5, 2012, Federal Register. When ICD-10-CM goes into effect, you should apply the code set and official guidelines in effect for the date of service reported.

Note: More information on ICD-10 is at www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10. For more information on the transition to the new coding set, subscribe to Eli's Home Health ICD-9 Alert at www.elihealthcare.com.