Since ICD-10 implementation affects almost every department in a medical practice or hospital, it's fair to say that it's more than a medical coding problem. There are plenty of challenges to tackle across the organization.

With the insurance and healthcare landscape in this country changing on almost a monthly basis, payer software vendor HealthEdge has begun conducting regular surveys of insurers as a means to take the pulse of a market at any given time. The surveys, conducted currently at six-month intervals, provide a snapshot of the industry. Ray Desrochers, executive vice president of sales and marketing at HealthEdge recently talked to Healthcare Finance News Senior Editor Chris Anderson about some of the findings of the most recent survey.

Think the transition to ICD-10 is just learning a bunch (a real big bunch) of new codes? Think again. A session held Oct. 22 during MGMA-ACMPE's annual conference in San Antonio laid out the impact of ICD-10 on physician practices and how they can prepare for it on the cheap.

Okay then - we have an ICD-10 implementation date: Oct. 1, 2014. It has taken 19 years for the industry to get this close to what is actually a fairly modest goal - upgrade a classification system used extensively in healthcare for reimbursement transactions, quality initiatives, epidemiological tracking and clinical research from the thirty-year-old ICD-9-CM to the latest completed version, ICD-10-CM/PCS.

With HHS issuing a final rule that establishes Oct. 1, 2014 as the ICD-10 compliance deadline, physicians and medical personnel are girding themselves for what many officials perceive to be a complex labyrinth of documentation.