Webinar: Anticipating the Disruption from HIPAA 5010 Forms and ICD-10: Essential Action Steps to Maintain Your Lab’s Cash Flow

Attention all labs: There’s a major deadline looming. Conversion to HIPAA 5010, the new form for electronic healthcare transactions, must be completed by January 1, 2012. That’s less than eight months from today.

This revised form accommodates the new ICD-10 codes, which represent an even bigger change in how your lab submits claims and which take effect in 2013. Form 5010 must be in place, fully tested and ready to go, before ICD-10 codes can be implemented. No small feat, given the scope of the changes to come. And if you think your laboratory has plenty of time to prepare, think again.

There’s software to update, staff to train, and significant changes that your lab will need to make to its procedures and materials. Not to mention taking steps to ensure that you and everyone on your team understand exactly what it means to be 5010-compliant.

Recent studies indicate that both individual laboratories and the healthcare industry are far less prepared than they should be. But waiting is risky, so why take the chance that your lab will be caught short when the deadlines roll around?

What’s at risk if you’re not ready? Your lab’s revenue and timely reimbursements from Medicare carriers and private payers. Without the ability to use the new 5010 form and the new ICD-10 codes, you can pretty much guarantee a hefty increase in your lab’s rate of claim denials. That means extra work to resubmit these claims, then additional weeks or even months of waiting for your lab to finally get paid.

Find out how you can protect your lab’s revenue when you join The Dark Report and DarkDaily.com for a very timely audio conference about the new 5010 form and ICD-10 codes. Listen as Lâle White, CEO at XiFin, Inc., provides you with a 5010 compliance readiness timeline. You’ll learn:

• Specific action steps your laboratory should take
• How to assess your lab’s readiness for 5010 implementation
• “Must-achieve” benchmarks to ensure your lab meets the January 2012 deadline for 5010 compliance

You’ll also get practical insights on lessons learned as a XiFin lab prepares to be fully compliant for 5010 in January 2012, followed by ICD-10 in 2013.

Adding to the burden of implementation is the fact that the number of ICD-10 codes is expected to increase from 17,000 to more than 75,000. But there is some good news in all of this: because ICD-10 includes codes for many new healthcare diagnoses and procedures, they’ll add precision to the bills your lab submits to payers for new genetic and molecular tests. But it’s not just labs that will need to be ready for this explosion of codes. Your lab won’t get paid unless its physician-clients are prepared as well. That means developing a strategy to ensure that your doctor clients-and their staffs-are well versed in the correct codes and can submit accurate test orders to your lab that include the appropriate ICD-10 codes.

This audio conference is designed to help your laboratory get a head start on preparations. The one-two implementation of 5010 forms in 2012 and ICD-10 in 2013 raises the stakes for your laboratory to submit clean claims and get timely reimbursement from Medicare carriers and private payers. It will help you better assess the readiness of your key payers and vendors, and give you tips on how to interact with these payers so that your lab’s 5010 submissions are accepted and processed in a timely manner. It’s an important management strategy that will protect your lab’s cash flow. And because payers are struggling to get ready for 5010 claims submissions, many of them could prove to be an obstacle in transitioning to the new forms. You’ll learn proven strategies your laboratory can use in response to payers who lag behind in 5010 preparedness.

Because this audio conference is about how your laboratory submits its claims-and how quickly payers reimburse you-it’s a “must-attend” event.

Here’s just some of what you’ll learn during this in-depth 90-minute audio conference recording:

• How to assess your lab’s readiness for 5010 implementation.
• Using the right checklists to prepare your lab’s coding, billing, and collections workflow to properly support the HIPAA 5010 form.
• Easy ways to avoid the most common problems.
• What you need to know to protect your lab’s cash flow as payers struggle with their own 5010 adoption issues.
• Tools to decipher the rhetoric on 5010 and ICD-10.
• A set of metrics and milestones to use during implementation.
• How to assess your vendors’ preparedness.
• Why 5010 is the “easy” implementation compared to the challenges associated with ICD-10 adoption.
• The possible consequences of missing the deadline.

DARK Daily is an e-briefing service providing up-to-the minute news of relevance for anyone working in diagnostic medicine, from clinical laboratories and pathology groups to lab industry suppliers and diagnostic technology companies. DARK Daily is part of The Dark Intelligence Group, Inc. and is dedicated to bringing useful business and management intelligence to laboratory managers, pathologists and diagnostic executives. Dark’s recognized expertise in the strategic direction of laboratory medicine and the management of laboratories is available through DARK Daily, The Dark Report, free White Papers, Lab Resource Directory, the Executive War College on Laboratory and Pathology Management, Lab Quality Confab, and strategic consulting services.