Continuing to weave its way into various corners of healthcare organizations IT architectures, ICD-10 has picked up some BPM (business process management) and BPO (business process outsourcing) support as vendors unwrapped new services designed to help with compliance.
“The need to move to ICD-10 is causing healthcare organizations to ponder whether they should adopt a partner with an ICD-10-compliant solution and convert both tech and business processes to that partner,” explains Janice Young, program director of IDC's Health Insights. “BPM and integration services vendors are increasingly announcing applications of their solution to support ICD-10 conversion and/or testing solution.”
Most recently, Data Dimensions detailed HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 readiness assessment and transition services, while Sourcecorp announced offerings to help healthcare organizations make the move from ICD-9 to ICD-10. The two join a host of BPO and IT services provider building out their portfolio in support of HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10, including Infosys, Patni, Technosoft – and these are just the companies to make public moves either this month or during the past few.
[Related: Why 2011 is the year to build hardware into your ICD-10 budget. Podcast: On the advent of a master data management ICD-10 appliance.]
Describing the new offering, Data Dimensions said its “secure, non-intrusive solution provides a cross functional diagnosis across IT systems, providing an impact analysis with estimates to develop a road map to the October 1, 2013 compliance deadline,” in its prepared statement. Sourcecorp, meanwhile, said its array of services span “planning, project management, education and training to documentation improvement, coding support and revenue integrity analysis.”
Technosoft's healthcare practice lead Parsuram Sahoo explained that BPM tools can be used to improve operation speed, reduce operational and implementation costs in the ICD-10 conversion.
If that sounds like a broad impact, well, it is. “Almost anything outsourced may have a touchpoint with ICD-10,” adds Joseph Nichols, MD, principal at Health Data Consulting. Indeed, as the compliance date closes in, more and more BPO and BPM players will add ICD-10 to their portfolios.
And one thing is certain: Other technology specialists will step toward ICD-10 offerings as the October 1, 2013 deadline approaches. “MDM (Master Data Management) vendors are also moving into this market,” IDC's Young adds, including HL1 and Informatica, among others. Nichols expects that “outsourced coding operations will have a tremendous opportunity” as well.
Tom Sullivan blogs regularly at ICD10Watch.com.
