Health information tech is "distruptive technology"

The description for a Harvard Business Review article reprint of "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave;" Jan 1, 1995, offers fundamental thinking- and strategy- to healthcare providers and management in the implementation of ICD-10 and health information technology (HIT).

In the context of patients, patient care, practices, and facilities, "Catching the Wave" is a primer on HIT pro-action and preventing sleepless nights.

One of the most consistent patterns in business is the failure of leading companies to stay at the top of their industries when technologies or markets change. Why is it that established companies invest aggressively- and successfully- in the technologies necessary to retain their current customers but then fail to make the technological investments that customers of the future will demand?

The fundamental reason is that leading companies succumb to one of the most popular, and valuable, management dogmas: they stay close to their customers. To remain at the top of their industries, managers must first be able to spot disruptive technologies.

To pursue these technologies, managers must protect them from the processes and incentives that are geared to serving mainstream customers. And the only way to do that is to create organizations that are completely independent of the mainstream business.

Perhaps the health care practice or system may elect to form its own HIT (Health Information) Unit in collaboration with other practices and computer information systems departments at technical institutes. Pooling medical and technical expertise may streamline implementation efforts such as workflow analysis and specifying requirements.

Healthcare providers are confronting the disruptive technology of HIT. Electronic health, electronic medical, and personal health record systems will, if the politicians have their way, largely replace paper as the primary documentation medium. Concurrent and simultaneous implementations of two additional disruptive technologies- ANSI 5010 for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) transactions and International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) undoubtedly will test the resourcefullness and patience of professionals in information technology as well as in healthcare.

Every computerized medical record system has to accommodate documentation regulations in order to satsfy

• Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations
• HIPAA
• third-party payer
• medico-legal and
• regulatory stipulations.

Doctors, nurses, and health organization managers who have these systems have no option to merely "plug and play" the tools.

Fundamentally, they will have to learn technical, workflow, and regulatory details of HIT in order to even open the door to practice medicine. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have given providers an ultimatum (Ingenix):

Health and Human Services (HHS) released the final rule for implementing the 5010 transaction standard for health care claims, and version D.0. for pharmacy claims. The final rule indicates that trading partners have to be ready to exchange 5010 transactions starting December 2010 and can ONLY exchange 5010 transactions starting January 1, 2012.

Covered entities

• health plans
• health care clearinghouses and
• certain health care providers

must use 5010 in electronically conducting certain health care administrative transactions, such as claims, remittance, eligibility, claims status requests and responses, and others.

The "must use" date for ICD-10 coding is Oct. 1, 2013.