In order to prepare for the ICD-10 compliance deadline by October 1, medical facilities will need to integrate revenue cycle and EHR systems that follow the new coding set. The State of Washington Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) recently announced their association with health IT supplier Cerner Corporation to revolutionize their revenue cycle systems and EHR technology in order to better align with ICD-10.
Recently Victoria Roberts, Deputy Assistant Secretary at DSHS, and Justin Dickey, Consulting Practice Director at Cerner, spoke with EHRIntelligence.com to discuss their collaboration further and better prepare providers for the ICD-10 compliance deadline. The two individuals began by discussing how the collaboration will lead to better preparedness for the ICD-10 transition.
“In Washington state, we have two state hospitals that are each about 100 years old and a much newer child study and treatment center. Within those 100 years, these facilities have all worked very independently. They are still very dependent on paper systems,” Roberts explained. “This project is allowing us to really look at how to work with continuity between hospitals, develop more consistent policy and practice, and bring the hospitals into the current century.”
Justin Dickey added: “Our teams are coming together to focus on standardizing workflow and developing a standardized tool set with the Cerner Millennium clinical and revenue cycle platform. More than technology, this is a lot about organizational change management and making sure we have the training programs in place to facilitate the use of the tool set we’re delivering.”
The integration of these health IT tools such as the revenue cycle system will play a key role in improving patient safety and quality of care. Victoria Roberts expanded on this goal.
“The biggest [part of this] is how we share information across shifts and across wards about individual patients,” Roberts said. “One of the things that I’ve been pushing forward is finding a way [to help] nurses and mental health technicians immediately see through the Cerner system the alerts they need to pay attention to.”
“Right now in our facilities, we continue to use white boards and white boards aren’t always updated as they should be. Sometimes things happen at 10 o’clock in the morning that don’t get communicated to the shift that comes at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. The hope is that through the Cerner system that information can be entered into the EHR and then communicated out through the alert board.”
Roberts went on to explain how allergy and medication alerts play a role in helping physicians provide safe care. Cerner representative Justin Dickey mentioned that “a task-driven clinical workflow allows [Cerner] to ensure they’re leading clinicians down the right path and also to have a mechanism that measures the quality of documentation as care is progressing through the organization.”
While the health IT tools are used in collaboration to increase the quality of care, they are also impacting the revenue cycle and ensuring that the document quality of claims are up to high standards. The two individuals went on to speak about solutions they’re incorporating to prevent any issues once the ICD-10 compliance deadline takes hold.
“One of the [solutions] we’re dependent on is the dashboard report,” Roberts said. “This allows us to understand the workflow and how well different staff are adopting to the model.”
“Our toolset has a physician dashboard that allows us to zero in on clinicians’ usability experience,” said Justin Dickey. “It identifies the areas where we may need to increase training and assist [promoting] workflow. The dashboard helps track problem areas and gives a tool set that shows what to focus on and issue remediation.”
While incorporating new health IT systems is necessary for the ICD-10 transition, providers are also concerned about other areas with regard to the upcoming ICD-10 compliance deadline. Many fear delayed payments and claim rejections from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Victoria Roberts and Justin Dickey spoke about best practices to follow in order to avoid these issues during the ICD-10 compliance deadline.
“From the state perspective, it’s really anticipating and planning for the training curve that will take for the staff to support the implementation. We’re going from a primarily paper system to an electronic system with staff who rarely have need to even check e-mail,” Roberts explained. “It’s figuring out how to invest and support the staff during the transition.”
Justin Dickey added that Cerner is “helping define those workflows and giving the tools necessary to manage denials and throughput [as well as] giving a visual of what’s happening through the care process and payment process.”
The new EHR systems that DSHS will be using include a diagnostic assistance tool that includes natural language clinicians can easily understand. It provides a simple way to find the right diagnostic coding at the needed specificity instead of forcing physicians to search through a large variety of codes.
“The natural language helps clinicians choose and navigate down to the appropriate level of specificity within the ICD-10 code set,” Justin Dickey mentioned.
