Healthcare systems preparing for the ICD-10 transition are still not devoting enough attention to preparing physicians for the clinical documentation that will be required when the number of diagnosis codes jumps from 14,000 to 68,000 next year. That’s one of the conclusions that Heather Haugen, corporate vice president of the Breakaway Group, a health IT consulting firm, and Breakaway CEO Charles Fred reached after they conducted a CIO focus group.
“The number-one finding was the lack of attention being paid to clinical documentation,” Haugen told InformationWeek Healthcare. “The CIOs understood issues related to vendor readiness, their own application readiness, and coder training. But under 5% mentioned provider readiness and clinical documentation improvement.”
This is going to be a major challenge for healthcare organizations, Haugen said, considering the lack of physician engagement in the process up to now. Some hospital executives have made matters worse by describing ICD-10 as a coding mandate. When ICD-10 was explained to them that way, she said, “physicians were completely turned off, because that is not important to them.”
To get physicians involved in ICD-10 initiatives, Haugen said, organizations need to show them why ICD-10 is important to the organization in areas that physicians do relate to, such as quality improvement and reporting on quality measures. When they do that, she says, physicians “get that this isn’t just about a coding change. This is something that has a purpose in our organization, and our electronic health record adoption plan is aligned with ICD-10.”
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