ICD-10 involves roughly 155,000 codes, which is fairly daunting for hospital coders, and “odds are low” that implementation date will be moved back again from its current go-live date of Oct. 1, 2014, according to Mr. Lance. “It froze a lot of the market,” he said.
North Highland has set out to make the process a little simpler. They developed an algorithm to determine which ICD codes matter — those that have the highest impact for organizations. It turns out, 80 percent of patient charges are tied to 5 to 15 percent of the total number of codes. “That’s a pretty powerful number,” he said.
North Highland’s algorithm focused on 3,000 to 5,000 high-impact codes, which gives hospitals a manageable place to start down the road of ICD-10 implementation.
