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2/3/2012

Atigeo Believes Successful Transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 by October 2013 is Achievable - Open Letter to Speaker Boehner

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The Honorable John A. Boehner
Speaker
United States House of Representatives
H-232 US Capitol
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Speaker Boehner:

We at Atigeo believe successful transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 by October 2013 is not only desirable, but achievable. There appears to be a perception such a transition will require a phalanx of additional coders, accompanied by an army of "consultants." This is not the case. While we of course believe Atigeo's solution best fits the bill, we are not alone in crafting advanced technological solutions which analyze EMRs and provide computing assistance to effect a smooth transition for the healthcare community.1

We welcome the opportunity to share with you and other members of the Congress our intelligent technological solutions. Solutions which bring multiple levels of benefit, specifically with respect to increase efficiency and accuracy of the coding processes, which results in:

  • Optimize resources
  • Billing returns optimized
  • Precision and accuracy enhanced
  • Through-put improved
  • Lower training costs
  • Reduced infrastructure
  • Higher productivity

In addition, successful ICD-10 transition not only brings greater finite detail to patient records, but will also enable the evolution of additional advancements in healthcare including:

  • Standardizing medical data for research
  • Accessing and interpolating global health data in any language
  • Drug discovery for complex diseases
  • Individualized medicine (both predictive and preventative)
  • Clinical decision support
  • Improved patient outcomes
  • Optimized billing
  • Accurate insurance administration.

Furthermore, we believe ICD-10 codes provide definitions for health conditions that are more consistent with SNOMED and other clinical definitions of medical concepts. The flexibility of ICD-10 allows for the expansion of codes to keep pace with changes in medical knowledge and concept definitions. If the healthcare community cannot successfully transition to ICD-10, then these and many other long-term patient benefits will suffer.

We therefore respectfully disagree with the position taken by the American Medical Association2 requesting the Congress to put a stop to the implementation of ICD-10 and agree with the position of the American Health Information Management Association's Dan Rode, vice president for advocacy and policy, who noted, "Without ICD-10 data, there will be serious gaps in our ability to extract important patient health information that will give physicians and the healthcare industry measures for quality of care, provide important public health surveillance, support modern-day research and move to a payment system based on quality and outcomes." 3

We are prepared to avail ourselves to you at your earliest convenience to discuss and demonstrate how advances in technology can ease the transition to ICD-10.

Sincerely,

Christopher Burgess
Chief Operating Office & Chief Security Officer
Atigeo, LLC
800 Bellevue Way NE - Suite 600
Bellevue, WA. 98004
o: 425-635-3900
f: 425-637-6950

1 xPatterns Computer-Assisted Coding, Atigeo’s analytics and search technology - http://www.xpatterns.com
2 Letter from James L. Madara, MD – CEO American Medical Association - http://thehill.com/images/stories/blogs/healthwatch/icd10.pdf
3 AHIMA Warns:  Keep Moving on ICD-10 Transition - http://www.ahima.org/downloads/pdfs/pr/press-releases/don't_stop_transition.pdf