If you are a practicing physician then chances are that you will have some kind of anxiety about various issues regarding the ICD-10 transformation. These issues more or less are regarding the workflow of your practice, documentation, audits, claims denials and reimbursements.

What a physician should do is to encourage the other physicians to ask their payers to be more transparent to their payers about the topics like complexity of the coding and documentation details. So that physicians can be more aware about it and thus can improve their relevant internal systems.

This transformation is a painful process and can have negative impact on the clinical decision making and patient care. In other words physicians do not want extra documentation that would require extra work or a very detailed use of new ICD-10 codes. Payers need to provide a high level of transparency to address the concerns of the physicians. Because now physicians are waiting for payers to reveal their rules and what do they expect from the physicians when reviewing the documentation.

This is an opportunity for all of us to create a friendly atmosphere between payers and physicians where both can have an honest conversation with each other regarding the ICD-10 transformation. The common enemy is the number of denied claims because in that situation no one wins.

On October 2, 2014 most of the practices have to deal with delayed claims and reimbursements and lots of questions regarding the ICD-10 about which code is right. It will be followed by a large number of rejections of claims in the following days and weeks.

 If a practice or a physician hasn’t finished its testing, training of staff and development of new workflows and documentation before the deadline, then they are going to face a great inefficiency for a long duration. This can end up being a painful process and can have a negative impact on decision making and patient care.

It is hard to avoid all these problems even after lots of meetings and conversations on health IT throughout the year 2014. Transparency and honesty by physicians can speed and ease up the ICD-10 transformation process.