CMS' ICD-10 and HIPAA 5010 Transaction update

The bottom line to summarize the impact of these changes is that legacy vendors are going to have to "expand" the field for storing ICD-9 codes by 2 characters.

Sound familiar?  

This is the same type of expansion required for Y2K changes. For Y2K, any programming routine that needed a date was impacted. For the ICD-10 update, any programming routing that currently needs to consider the ICD-9 codes will need to be changed.

Thus, if you have a system that currently uses ICD-9 codes, you've got a lot of changes to make. If you have a system that doesn't currently use the ICD-9 codes, that indicates that your legacy system is not helping you much in the adjudication process.

Either way, you owe it to yourself to look at SpyGlass. It's a claim system that was made for HIPAA, is fully web-based, and designed to support the market needs of today. It's a true "google era" application.

Check out a PDF summary of the rules with our comments/commentary
This document is also available as html online at the CMS' website