ICD-10 | 100x More Complicated | Q&A
As your practice is preparing for the impending ICD-10 changes, you might have many questions concerning chiropractic billing procedures and software requirements. To help you get the answers you need, we have compiled all questions that were asked during our recent webinar ‘ICD-10 | 100 Times More Complicated,’ along with the presenter’s responses. Feel free to add any new questions in the comment section below. Q: I have a question about the top 50 ICD-9 codes we use, and doing the crosswalk to ICD-10. Where is the best resource for being able to do that? A: CMS GEMS would be one website that you can use; that’s CMS’s GEMS System, which is the General Equivalent System that they use — the General Equivalent Mapping System that they use to translate ICD-9 to ICD-10. Another good site for you is AAPC.com. Click on their ICD-10 link and they have a feature where you type in our ICD-9 and it returns the equivalent ICD-10 code. GEMS prompts you to choose the lateralities and origins, whereas AAPC is more one-to-one, but GEMS is really what most systems are basing their crosswalk from, and GEMS is built and maintained by CMS, the CDC, and AMA. Q: I’ve done all my conversions from ICD-9 to ICD-10 and I’ve done the left and right conversions. We’ve changed some of our chiropractic documentation so it’s more specific about mechanism of injury — the when, where, the why and the how. What else is there really to do? A: You really want to make sure that how the practice is supposed to document the guidelines for chiropractic documentation are clearly outlined in your policies and procedures manual. And that means adding in specificity and laterality. The manual should also have references as to where you seek the information; your reference point would be to CMS. Q: If I want to take a coding course to get certified, do I need to be certified on ICD-9 and ICD-10? A: Right now, you have to certify for both, but after October 1, you only have to certify for ICD-10. Q: Are you able to come out and help us train our staff? A: We can give you the tools that you need in order to train your practice. For chiropractic documentation, have them listen to our webinar in March, but they can also take external classes — specifically from the AAPC, because their classes on physician documentation are extraordinary. In terms of crosswalking, we will work with you. View our ICD-10 page that has a collection of information about ICD-10.
Chiropractic Notes | Clinics that use xDocs generate more revenue
If you are completing your chiropractic SOAP notes on paper you might wonder why you are still light years away from building your dream practice. Aside from stealing valuable time away from other income-producing activities, paper patient documentation has been shown to seriously hurt the profitability of a chiropractic clinic, especially in comparison to using digital xDocs. Granted, change can be scary and painful– even more so if you have to trade familiarity and convenience for complicated technological processes. But what if the transition to digital documentation with xDocs, in fact, made the whole patient documentation process simpler? With auto-populating forms that fill in patient demographics and can be completely customized to match your old paper forms, xDocs are easy to use from day one. Best of all, xDocs make EMR follow the chiropractor’s workflow so he is more likely to complete the SOAP note while he is still with the patient, then submit it at the end of the appointment with the click of a button instead of staying up late at night to catch up on paperwork. It goes without saying that faster submission of SOAP notes directly impacts the billing process and improves the cash flow at any chiropractic clinic. Moreover, spending more time treating your patients will increase your patient flow and as such also improve your clinic’s profitability. Not to mention that going digital will also earn you a meaningful use stimulus from the U.S. Government to encourage EMR/EHR transitions while making it easier to stay on top of any changes made by payers. In the end it’s all about commitment, though. If you don’t make a complete transition to xDocs and only use them with half of your patients or even less frequently, your results will suffer accordingly and produce a much smaller margin of billing improvement as obvious in the example below. Practice D was using xDocs for less than 12% of the visits and achieved no meaningful improvement in billing performance: With a 100 percent commitment to transition and use, however, you can potentially double your clinic’s billing performance in about three months’ time as clearly achieved in the example below. Practice A started using xDocs in May, in just three months their billing more than doubled: Ultimately, the potential uses of xDocs at your chiropractic clinic are almost limitless and include required PIP documentation, chiropractic intake forms, visit documentation, care plan tracking or any other special purpose from within Genesis’ cloud-based Vericle platform.