In the AMA cost study carried out by
Nachimson Advisors, it was revealed that there was a sharp increase in ICD-10
implementation prices as compared to a report in 2008.
Convincing
the physicians to adopt ICD-10 is cumbersome for the practices, combined with
their inability to spent time and resources on other government mandates that
can incur significant penalties.
James
L. Madara MD, vice president and CEO of AMA mentioned that “physicians are
facing serious financial obstacles from multiple sources” other barriers
include:
- Additional costs that require practices to fulfill Meaningful Use and that surpasses the available incentives.
- Buying EHR Software certified for year 2014 or the EHR software updates allowing the practices to use ICD-10 codes
- Applying upgrades to the Practice Management Systems for ICD-10
- Additional penalties for not meeting ePrescribing, Meaningful Use and Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS)
The costs to implement the ICD-10 in the year 2008 were as follows, $83,290 for small practices, $285,195 for medium and $2,728,780 for large practices.
According to the
new study in 2014 the cost ranges for each practice were based on factors such
as vendor, specialty and software.
- Cost for small practices range from $6,639 to $226,105
- Cost for medium practices range from $213,364-$824,735
- Cost for large practices range from : $2,017,151-$8,018,364
Approximately 70 percent of the practices fall in the upper range of the cost that is much higher than the 2008 estimates, according to reports from AMA. The main factors that make up the total costs include costs of software upgrades, training, testing, practice assessments and loss of productivity for the physicians.
The data from AMA
shows that vendors not adequately prepared for ICD-10 implementation. Thus only
few practices are able to conduct testing of the new codes and implement
workflow changes.
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