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ICD-10 Transition, How Much Will it Cost a Small Practice?

Practice Fusion has provided a great article explaining some of the factors to consider when assessing what the ICD-10 transition will cost your practice. As the article states, it will be considerably less costly to become proactive with your training and preparation sooner than later…

Excerpt:

“As much as we’d love to, we can’t give a simple dollar amount that applies to all small practices – the number of factors involved in calculating this cost makes a “blanket” number unrealistic. But we can say this…

Let’s consider a small practice (two providers, one office manager, and one coder/biller) that really “does it right” — they use cloud-based software to save on overhead and maintenance fees, follow recommendations from CMS, properly train staff, communicate with vendors, and complete successful end-to-end tests with ample time before October 1. This practice might be able to survive the transition for as little as $10K-25K.

Now take a practice that ignores recommended implementation timelines, neglects the need for adequate training, and fails to hold their vendors and payers accountable. This practice will encounter some very serious revenue cycle problems. We recommend you run some projections for worst-case scenarios specific to your practice, but we have to warn you – the numbers can get pretty scary…”

The transition to ICD-10 is not going to be a quick or simple process for providers. It’s expected to be time consuming, burdensome and costly for most providers. Like the authors, I recommend you seek out as much training, ICD-10 information and professional assistance as you need now, so you will not have a significant drop in revenue in October.

Authored by: Cara Buckhaulter and Kevin McCarthy of NueMD on Practice Fusion’s Blog