News: Survey shows ICD-10 transition successful at 80% of organizations; ACDIS poll shows 'minimal' effect on query efforts

The transition to ICD-10 has gone smoothly for 80% of organizations, according to a survey conducted by KPMG, LLC. A group of 298 attendees of the November 9 webcast, “ICD-10: Just the Beginning,” hosted by KPMG, responded to the survey, which found that 28% said the transition has been smooth and 51% said they have experienced a few technical issues, but have overall been successful. Only 11% described the transition as a failure.

The largest challenges respondents reported include clinical documentation and physician education, rejected medical claims, and reduced revenue from coding delays, with 42% attributing ICD-10 as the main reason for these issues, according to the survey.

The expansion from 13,000 to 68,000 diagnostic codes has a number of organizations (46%) considering initiatives such as clinical documentation improvement, revenue cycle optimization, and electronic health record optimization, the survey found. However, 25% said they are not currently pursuing these options.

In response to the question “Has your query rate increased since ICD-10 implementation?” on the ACDIS website, most of 552 respondents indicated the transition hasn’t increased their queries per se. Responses included:

• 52%-Not really, we are still asking the same documentation queries we'd been asking
• 28%-Yes, but minimally, around 5-10% increase
• 16%Yes, extensively, but as expected around 11-30%
• 3%-Don't know

Click here to view a replay of the KPMG webcast.