A recent KLAS survey revealed that only 9% of respondents were more than halfway through their ICD-10 readiness preparations. This is a little disconcerting when you think about the timeline and the millions of dollars this could take for the large and some mid-size facilities.

Information Week Healthcare brought this to our attention in their article, “ICD-10 Madness: Most Providers Aren’t Ready.” The survey relied on 163 healthcare providers. Eighty-three percent said they are in the early stages of their preparation while 8% said they had not started at all.

The new ICD-10 classification system has five times more codes. Medical coding requires specialized expertise and systems tailored to the regulatory requirements in which health care providers, hospitals, and doctors deliver their services. Training staff is a key component of the transition.

Many widely used tagging systems lack the user friendly interface and may not implement a rigorous ANSI compliant coding subsystem. Access Innovations’ solutions are ANSI compliant and implement state-of-the-art technology to speed tagging and reduce errors.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.