“We'll get you to ICD-10,” athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said in a media release, “or you don't have to pay for it.”
More specifically, athenahealth explained that “all new clients” who sign on by June's end in 2014 to its hosted EHR, patient communications and practice management services “will be ICD-10 compliant or athenahealth will waive its fee until the compliance standard is met.”
Calling it "an implicit, functional guarantee to all clients," Dan Haley, vice president of government and regulatory affairs at athenahealth explained that "all clients will achieve the same level of ICD-10 preparedness [because we’re on a multitenant cloud platform] at no additional cost. ICD-10 compliance is not a new business service; it is [or soon will be] an essential component of our existing services."
Citing its own survey of more than 1,200 doctors, the vendor said that 33 percent of respondents fall under the categories of “not at all confident” or “not very confident” that they can handle converting to the new code sets by the October 1, 2014 deadline.
While vendor-conducted studies are often suspected to be driving an agenda, athenahealth’s results, which the company said it will release in full later this summer, certainly jibe with data published this week by AHIMA finding that only 17 percent have ICD-10 project plans underway, as well as the seminal ICD-10 readiness survey conducted by WEDI — the results circulated in mid-April suggested an industry disconcertingly “falling behind” on the ICD-10 migration.
The current state of the industry encompasses the oft-discussed concern that as providers, and payers albeit to a lesser extent, as well as their IT vendors procrastinate on ICD-10, healthcare organizations will be scrambling at the last minute to either install software upgrades or switch vendors entirely. Not helping matters: CMS just last week stated simply that providers cannot rely as heavily on clearinghouses for ICD-10 as many did for the HIPAA 5010 transition.
Under its promise, athenahealth said it will “monitor staff progression, payer testing, lab testing, clearinghouse testing,” so that “clients will be able to send ICD-10 compliant claims … and select ICD-10 diagnosis codes in athenaClinicals, while athenahealth works to get claims adjudicated. Should athenahealth not be able to meet these conditions, the company would waive all fees until such time that it is compliant.”
And athenahealth intends to “backstop the revenue cycle for independent practices by providing a cash advance against submitted claims, if those claims are delayed by payers in the ICD-10 transition period.”
The sweet spot for athenahealth’s ICD-10 guarantee likely will be those smaller physician groups that have simply waited to embark on ICD-10, electronic medical records, or to achieve meaningful use. Indeed, glancing as far back as 2010, the cloud computing model has long been hailed as a viable option for achieving compliance.
"The key to all of this is the fact that we are cloud-based," Haley said. "And all of our clients are on precisely the same instance of software. When the first client gets our ICD-10-compliant update, every single other client gets that update simultaneously."
Related articles:
AHIMA's 4 action items to take today for ICD-10 implemetation
WEDI, state collaboratives prep ICD-10 initiative
ICD10Watch: Is there an ICD-10 code for political misinformation?
