Healthcare providers expect major financial headaches from ICD-10, survey says

As the industry anxiously and eagerly awaits the ICD-10 deadline, let's take a look at some of the aspects providers are most concerned about now.

While the ICD-10 compliance deadline draws continually closer, an exact snapshot of industry readiness remains somewhat elusive. But new researchshows there are s significant number of financial concerns with the rollout.

Porter Research conducted a survey, commissioned by billing and payments solution vendor Navicure, during August 2015 and determined that the sate of industry readiness is shaky optimism carrying a number of concerns about what will happen after the Oct. 1, 2015 deadline.

[Also: ICD-10 checklist: AHA releases step-by-step preparation guide]

Here the top 3 fears Porter found:

1. Disrupted cash flow. A whopping 94 percent of participants anticipate increased denial rates – but that doesn't mean they're taking action to quell the concern just yet. "Only 30 percent have improved their denial management processes in preparation for this," the companies write in a new report that Healthcare Finance sister site Healthcare IT News got an exclusive early look at on Monday. "While some organizations are being proactive in other areas to improve revenue and cash flow, including improving patient collections (34 percent) and patient price estimation (17 percent), 35 percent have not adjusted their revenue cycle in preparation for ICD-10."  

2. Overall negative impact. The study authors effectively lumped finances, operations and staff morale together on this point – and across those three areas more than 50 percent of participants "believe ICD-10 will impact their organizations negatively." On the other hand, 65 percent believe ICD-10 will have a neutral impact on patients and 9 percent are expecting the news codes to be either positive or very positive for patients.

3. Clinical documentation improvement and coding requirements. Almost a third of participants indicated that coding under ICD-10 is their most significant challenge. That said, though, respondents were optimistic in estimating that productivity losses. Nearly half answered that losses would be less than 20 percent and one-fifth expect not to experience any productivity drop at all.

Porter and Navicure found that among the respondents, which represented a broad array of provider sizes but was dominated by organizations with 10 or fewer physicians, 85 percent are optimistic about being prepared by the deadline, yet more than more than half (57 percent) are not on track today.

The Porter and Navicure research, as is the case with just about all vendor-sponsored research, should be taken along with the knowledge that Navicure stands to earn profits, if not customers, from highlighting these concerns. But other industry readiness surveys, most notable the one conducted by the Workgroup for Data Interchange, reported similar findings.